The Corpse Retriever of the Wu River

In the late 1990s, a night of torrential rain sweeps through the southwestern mountains beside the Wujiang River. The young corpse retriever Long Zhu breaks a hundred-year-old taboo, never retrieving corpses at midnight, to save his gravely ill mother. From Ghost Whirlpool Bay, he pulls up the well-preserved body of a woman in a white dress, clutching half of a dragon-patterned jade pendant in her hand. It is scorching to the touch. His employer, Shen San, is eager to burn the corpse, but Long Zhu discovers that a jade pendant left behind by his younger sister resonates with it.

That night, his master, Old Ghost Uncle, dies a grisly death. With his dying breath, he reveals a shocking secret: Long Zhu’s sister is a “vessel for water spirits,” and her seven souls have been sealed in different places along the Wujiang River. For generations, the Shen family has plotted to open the Grudge Cave beneath the river and unleash an ancient evil. The jade pendant is the key. The birthmark on Long Zhu’s left hand burns as he awakens the lost “Yin-Seeking Seal” of the corpse retrievers.

In search of the truth, he ventures deep into a Miao village and meets Aya, an inheritor of the Gu Poison Witch tradition, only to be drawn into an even deeper whirlpool. Fragments of memories from a past life surface, revealing that he and Aya are reincarnations of the martyrs who sealed the Grudge Cave a century ago. Desperate to break his family’s curse, which dooms its members to die before the age of forty-five, Shen San will stop at nothing.

As Long Zhu gathers his sister’s souls and fights Shen San, he discovers that Aya has his sister’s “soul of love” sealed within her. The seal beneath the Wujiang River begins to weaken, and the river turns blood-red. The first wave of corpses is about to come ashore. Gripping the jade pendant and his corpse-retrieving rope, Long Zhu faces the raging river and a sinister conspiracy, vowing to uncover every secret and renew the pact of the Wujiang...