At eighteen, Lin Mo committed the village’s greatest taboo: he looked into the ancient well on the night of a full moon. He saw something crawling out of the well, and it saw him too.
To escape the horror that followed, Lin Mo fled to the city, thinking that steel and concrete could keep the supernatural hunters at bay. He was wrong. The city was simply another kind of hunting ground.
No one has ever lived in Room 404 of his new apartment building, yet footsteps sound from within every night. When he works overtime until the early hours, an old-fashioned typewriter suddenly clatters in the empty office. Worst of all, whenever he takes the elevator, an impossible “B5” appears among the floor buttons. Everyone who presses it turns up in the ancient well back in his hometown the next day, horribly disfigured.
Lin Mo gradually realizes that he is not a victim, but a “sacrifice.” A hundred years ago, his ancestors struck a deal with some kind of entity, using their bloodline to preserve the balance between city and countryside. Now the pact is about to expire, and he is the last sacrifice.
But Lin Mo refuses to accept his fate. Before the next full moon, he must uncover the secrets beneath the city and find the “other well” that connects the city to the countryside. Yet when he finally stands atop the city’s tallest building and looks down at the streets laid out like a chessboard, he discovers in horror that the entire city is one enormous talisman, and he is standing right in the middle of the “well’s mouth.”
