Three years ago, Chen Qing, the last heir to a family of nuo opera performers, watched his grandfather frantically tear apart every ancestral nuo mask, smash the nuo deity statue, and force him to swear an oath: never touch nuo again, and stay away from everything connected to the family!
Three years later, the family home was demolished, and nine unidentified skeletons wearing bronze nuo masks were found beneath it. The Chen family crest was unmistakably engraved on the masks. That very night, the construction foreman clawed his own face and jumped to his death in a frenzy, howling the same prophecy before he died: “It’s coming back!”
At the scene, the police found a blood-red jade pendant.
That jade should have been buried deep underground with his grandfather.
The binding oath, the family secrets, the uncanny curse… An invisible hand dragged Chen Qing back into the abyss he had fought so hard to escape. His grandfather’s unspoken final warning, the truth hidden among the nine skeletons, and the chilling word “It” all pointed to a source of terror sealed away by time.
When Chen Qing broke his oath and picked up that cold key to his family’s past once more, he faced not only the family’s mysterious and unpredictable wu nuo arts, but also a global abyss of darkness slowly opening before him. Maoshan Daoist arts, Miaojiang Gu poison, Nanyang cursecraft, Western necromancy… Secret arts and evil forces from all over the world came pouring in.
