Chen Mo, a young man from an urban village, has been accompanied by a rusty copper lock for as long as he can remember. He thought he was just an ordinary young man struggling to make rent and get by, never realizing the lock concealed a secret powerful enough to upend the Three Realms. Knock nine times at midnight, and it opens a gate to another world. When the snake pattern on the lock stirs, strange creatures come calling.
His adoptive father's dying warning, a yellowed old photograph found at a scrapyard, black-scaled slime creeping beneath his door late at night, and blood-red words counting down three days. Only when one eerie incident follows another does Chen Mo realize that his eyes, black as an ancient well, do not belong to the mortal world.
Mysterious directions from an unknown number, a ghostly figure in a Sun Yat-sen suit beneath a pagoda tree, a writhing mass of scales in the arms of a woman in red, and a hanged ghost with braided hair inside the copper lock. Every clue points to a long-buried truth: he is no orphan, but a key abandoned in the rift between two worlds.
When a rent notice and an order from the other world demanding his life land before him at the same time, Chen Mo grips the copper lock and finally understands. What people call fate is merely a thunderbolt the gods and buddhas dare not touch, hidden among the daily concerns of ordinary people.
Pretty good-looking, right?