The Rusted Bone Crest

While performing a routine autopsy on an unidentified woman immersed in formalin, forensic pathologist Qin Zheng encounters a supernatural horror. The corpse suddenly opens its mouth, releasing dark red, corrosive fungal threads that attack him. They scorch the floor and eat through his clothes. More mysteriously, the burn scar on Qin Zheng's wrist, left by an undercover operation ten years ago, vanishes. At the same time, a newly discovered dark blue ring-shaped mark at the base of his left ring finger, connected to a corpse found floating in the city moat, begins to fade.

The temperature in the morgue plummets. A medieval bronze emblem depicting a stake wrapped in thorns appears on the corpse's collarbone, matching the distinctive marks on the victims in the six previous cases and confirming that this is the related “seventh corpse.” The building alarm sounds. Security footage shows the screen going black for 30 seconds at the moment the corpse stirred, yet system records indicate that Qin Zheng was alone in the morgue for 42 minutes.

Just then, Qin Zheng receives a text from an unknown number warning of his impending death and pointing to his morning jogging route. Outside the window, the blood from a fallen grey magpie traces the outline of the spire of the abandoned church where he shot a drug lord three years ago. The fungal threads burst with a crack, and something pounds from inside a morgue drawer. Visions surge into view: the scene of Qin Zheng's undercover mission ten years ago, where a woman wearing the same thorn emblem stands in the flames. Her face is eerily identical to the corpse on the autopsy table. Every clue points cruelly to an unknown and profound supernatural connection between Qin Zheng's past and the series of deaths unfolding now.