In the autumn of 1976, Lao Zhangtou died. After his three tile-roofed houses were empty, cries could be heard every night. The villagers said it was haunted, but seven-year-old Hu didn't believe it. He took two friends to explore the haunted house at night, but found a yellowed letter in the cellar. The signature is "Xin Sanxian".
The letter mentioned a list. A record contains the name of the person who led the way for the Japanese thirty-eight years ago.
From that day on, the three children were drawn into a buried history. They went into the mountains to look for the reclusive old Taoist priest Shouguan, and heard about the Qianyuan Temple massacre - on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1938, thirteen Taoist priests refused to reveal the whereabouts of the New Fourth Army and all died for their country. They found many lists left by Xin Sanxian, and also met the descendants of those on the lists: Sun Mazi, who could never hold his head up, Chen Eryou, who paid off his brother's debt, and the owner of an antique shop who came all the way from Nanjing to "please forgive"...
Everyone who comes to the list has their own debt. Some want to destroy it, some want to hide it, and some want to see what their fathers did back then.
In the process, the three children learned to recognize herbs, see celestial phenomena, and discern people's hearts, and gradually understood that the most terrifying thing in the world is not ghosts, but the ghosts in people's hearts. The most valuable thing is not not being afraid of ghosts, but seeing through people pretending to be ghosts and being able to keep your heart.
"Maoshan Bones" uses folklore puzzles as the shell and the game of human nature as the core to tell a story that spans forty years. There are haunted houses, suicide notes, old mountain priests, and descendants of traitors, but there are no real ghosts. Behind all the strange events, there are human hearts at work.
Maoshan has bones, not in the mountains, but in the human heart.
