Chen Du, a 22-year-old university student, receives a letter from his late grandfather on the day he graduates.
It contains just one sentence: “On the seventh day of the seventh month, the gates of hell will open halfway. Head north, and don’t look back.”
He thinks it’s just a joke, fourteen years overdue, until he discovers a woman in a red wedding dress lurking in his shadow: a woman who has been following him for a long time, and has no tongue.
His grandfather, Chen Jiuling, was a practitioner of yin-yang arts in life. Forty years ago, he and six fellow practitioners entered the remote mountains of western Hunan to try to seal a “Well of Ten Thousand People.” Six of the seven died that night. Only Chen Jiuling walked out alive. But what he brought back was more than just his life: it was something that clung to him like a shadow. It never spoke or showed itself. It simply followed him, day and night, always one step behind.
It wanted him to repay a debt. Not the debt of one life, but of several thousand.
Chen Jiuling traded his own life and the lives of four close relatives for fourteen years, and for an agreement that his grandson would repay the debt.
At twenty-two, Chen Du is forced through the gate at Sanqing Temple, the passage between the worlds of yin and yang. He has only fifteen days, from the twenty-second day of the sixth month to the seventh day of the seventh month, to learn the arts his grandfather never mastered, confront the failed ritual from forty years ago, and repay a blood debt spanning three generations.
And the woman in the red wedding dress is waiting for him by the well.
