Dissecting the Gods Beneath the Nuo Mask
A scientific scalpel vs. a mysterious Nuo god mask. A modern forensic pathologist uncovers an ancestral taboo Nuo ritual.
My name is Chen Mian, and I’m a forensic pathologist with the city bureau who trusts in scalpels and chains of evidence.
My grandfather was the village’s last Nuo opera performer. He said I had a murderous aura between my brows and was born to make a living among the dead.
I scoffed at him, until I personally fished a headless woman’s corpse out of the Blackwater River.
Around her neck hung a fragment of a Nuo mask that had been lost to our family for a hundred years.
The forensic results came back: my fingerprints were on the fragment.
But I’d never touched it.
Except in that dream three days ago. In it, I carved the fragment with my own hands.
The village elders trembled as they told me this was “the Nuo god coming to claim a life,” seeking a close blood relative to serve as a substitute.
I don’t believe in superstition. I only trust the truth revealed by a scalpel.
Until, in the morgue, the headless woman whispered to me in my grandfather’s voice:
“Dear grandson, once you’ve worn the mask for too long… you can never take it off.”
Only then did I understand:
Some curses sink deep into your bones.
Some masks, once worn, can never be removed.
And the secrets my scalpel must lay bare are not just those of a corpse.
They include the being that has lived for thousands of years, entwined with my family’s bloodline…
A god.
