After her grandfather, Lin Zhenghao, passes away, folklore graduate student Lin Chen receives a strange vermilion book titled The Daoist's Manual. He thinks it's simply one of his grandfather's belongings, unaware that it is the key to unlocking his fate and a curse.
“Read it, and you're in the game.”
A line of vermilion writing drags him into an unknown world of wonders and dangers. The life-taking whispers of a Daoist-robed figure in the dead of night, the inexplicable blood seeping from a family portrait... Everything tells him that his grandfather, Lin Zhenghao, once “broke the rules,” and now Lin Chen must repay that debt.
To stay alive and uncover his family's secrets, Lin Chen has no choice but to follow the “true stories” recorded in the manual. He gradually realizes that the book records not only the past, but also foretells the future. Every time he opens it, he gambles with the uncanny; every time he breaks through a predicament, he sinks deeper into a web where human hearts and the ghostly realm intertwine.
He can calculate the heavens, the earth, ghosts, and gods, but the unfathomable human heart remains beyond his reckoning. Lin Chen's journey is a fight for survival in the rift between reality and another world, and the ultimate search into his grandfather Lin Zhenghao's past and his own fate.
