In 1937, the rain in Shanghai always carried a stench that could never be washed away.
In a clock shop in the French Concession, more than a hundred antique clocks all stopped at midnight. The clockmaker lay in a pool of blood, his throat shredded by precision gears, yet there was no sign of a break-in. In a Zhabei embroidery workshop, an embroiderer in red turned into a dried corpse. Red thread still wound around her fingertips and half-finished wedding dress, moving as if alive in the windless room… One bizarre murder after another twined around this city where old and new collided. Western electric lamps could not pierce the shadows in its narrow alleys, and church bells could not dispel the sinister air beneath the hems of qipao dresses.
Gu Zhiyi stepped into the fog with her mysterious pocket dimension. Her left eye could see the true forms of ghosts and monsters, while her right could trace the paths of sinister energy. With a flick of her fingers, she could trap the lingering soul of a vengeful ghost in her dimension and grind it to dust. This sharp-tongued, haughty, max-level powerhouse had come for an ancient soul-absorbing jade, but was swept into an even more sinister whirlpool. Bloodstained clothes from the crime scenes and haunted objects possessed by resentful spirits revealed fragments of the truth on the tracing platform inside her dimension, all pointing to an evil organization called the Yinluo Society, which offered living people as sacrifices and disrupted the balance between yin and yang.
And then there was Mu Chenyuan, the man who kept crossing her path late at night, with madness hidden in his eyes. He could command countless wandering spirits with his own blood essence, and in his manic moments could lead an army of ghosts to flatten the concessions. Yet he was obsessively, almost pathologically fixated on Gu Zhiyi alone. “Your dimension can hold vengeful ghosts. Can it hold me?”
The hypocritical philanthropist Su Manqing hides a spirit-summoning spell inside the candy she offers; the overseas-educated scholar Gu Yechen conceals forbidden arts for stealing abilities in his laboratory; and the deranged priest Xiao Juehan sees Gu Zhiyi’s dimension as the perfect vessel for completing a forbidden ritual…
