Suspense writer Su Ran never imagined that two anonymous letters from his ancestral home deep in the mountains would tear open a century-old family secret. The familiar brushwork of the character “Su” on the letters, the “house-guarding fox” totem his grandmother never mentioned while she was alive, and the truth behind his uncle Su Ming’s mysterious disappearance twenty years ago all point to the abandoned village of Sujiayao and the old brick house deep within it, where a “forbidden place” lies hidden.
One letter urges him to return home and “ward off evil” before the fifteenth day of the seventh month. The other warns him, “The ancestral home is a prison. Do not enter.” The county records claim a “mudslide” occurred, but in truth, “all the trees withered overnight.” Guide Uncle Li is tight-lipped about the “Su Ming bloodshed,” and the redwood wardrobe in the west wing is strictly off-limits. Everywhere, there are signs of a suffocating eeriness.
Seeking the truth behind his grandmother’s lies, Su Ran ventures into the mountains with his assistant, Lin Yue. The deathly silence of the village sealed in thick fog, the vermilion gates of the ancestral home opening and closing by themselves, the bewitching sounds of loved ones imitated in the dead of night, the footprints of a child appearing from nowhere in the dust, and ancient prophecies from the Book of Changes, “Essence and energy take form,” and the Classic of Mountains and Seas, “The fox of Qingqiu bewitches people,” drag them into a perilous game against time. Is this a duty of protection ordained by their bloodline, or a trap laid by an evil creature? Only when the copper key touches the seal on the ancestral home does Su Ran understand: what he must face is not a “fox,” but an obsession buried deep in the human heart, more terrifying than any ghost.
