Late at night, the freezer at the convenience store always made a grinding sound. Lin Yanzhi, a college student, thought the refrigeration pipes were wearing out, until one early morning he felt a hand, cold as bronze, inside the freezer. The silver-chain pendant on it looked exactly like the fragment of the “Ding Eye” he had worn since childhood.
The pressure of his rent about to double left him struggling to breathe. Even stranger, a delivery driver suddenly floated through the air past the alley while making a delivery. And the old phone he’d picked up kept displaying news from thirty years ago. The workers in the photos at the Ding Vessel Factory had faces identical to his father’s.
As the bronze hand in the freezer began to “beckon” more and more often, Lin Yanzhi discovered he could understand what stray cats were saying. They always gathered in the alley behind the convenience store at midnight, letting out terrified yowls toward the ground. He was forced into a secret spanning three generations: descendants of the Ding Guardians, a bronze ding that could steal memories, and prophecies of the future hidden in old newspapers...
When the silver chain worn by Shen Ye’s mother cracked, revealing a retina sealed inside; when blood-red words appeared by themselves in Zhao Xiaoya’s grandfather’s notebook; when Lin Yanzhi finally saw the bronze threads coiling deep inside the freezer, he realized they weren’t refrigeration pipes at all. They were the blood vessels of the Mother Ding, creeping quietly along his shadow toward his heart.
“You think you’re guarding the ding? You’re actually the vessel it chose.” The mysterious figure in a trench coat left behind half a ding fragment engraved with the character “Forbidden,” then disappeared into the morning light. Lin Yanzhi touched the spot on his chest that was growing hot. Beneath the skin, something was quietly sprouting.
It turned out that the so-called Ding Guardians had never been protectors. They were seeds planted by the Mother Ding.
