On the 365th day when Chen Mo was working at a convenience store in an urban village, he picked up a hot copper bell.
This was the most unlucky start in his seventeen years - the landlord wanted to raise the rent, and the locust tree at the end of the alley grew a human face in the middle of the night. What was even weirder was that whenever he touched the copper bell, the bark of the locust tree would ooze from the freezer of the convenience store, and he was actually scanning the air to check out.
It wasn't until he met the pupilless man in a cloak on a rainy night that Chen Mo was shocked to realize that this copper bell was the talisman of the Yin and Yang worlds. Not only was it exactly the same as the fire scene where his parents died, but it also allowed him to see the countdown to his own death - at the 3rd hour of the 13th day of the lunar month, he would take out a bell and replace someone under the old locust tree.
When he found newspaper clippings from the 1997 fire in the library, in which he was an infant holding another copper bell; when the pocket watch of the girl next door, Lin Weiwei, began to rotate counterclockwise, and the charm on the back of the dial exactly matched the inside of the bell; when a convenience store regular suddenly turned into a talking locust tree spirit... Chen Mo finally understood: this death game spanning twenty years had been doomed from the moment he was born.
