On a rainy night, Lin Ye, so broke he can't pay his rent, stumbles upon a bronze scale dropped by a man in a suit. The palm-sized antique holds something sinister: its beam is crawling with patterns resembling human faces, and the red eyes of the little beast on its weight seem to follow people. Stranger still, it burrows into Lin Ye's destiny as if it were alive.
A mysterious figure in a black raincoat comes after him. A girl in a red dress smiles eerily at the mouth of the alley, and even his landlady, who has been hounding him for rent, bares inhuman fangs.
The bronze scale burns against his chest like a red-hot brand, driving him toward a midnight appointment at the City God Temple. When the words “See the scale as you would see me” appear on its beam, Lin Ye realizes the truth: this is no scale. It is a lock that hooks onto lives, binding the secrets of his unknown origins, a conspiracy spanning ten years, and a soul that should not exist.
It turns out the lives of ordinary people were torn apart long ago. From the moment he picked up the scale, Lin Ye had to learn to use his life as a counterweight, weighing the realms of yin and yang and fighting the demons and monsters lurking in the folds of the human world. But as layer upon layer of truth is peeled away, he discovers that the ones he should fear most have never been the ghosts and monsters... This is
“an epic Eastern folk-horror mystery about time, sacrifice, and restoration.” After the gates open, the Underworld intervenes in the human realm. To restore order amid the chaos, Lin Ye gradually takes control of the divine authority of justice.
