There are nine ranks of corpses: the Purple Stiff is the lowest, while the Golden-Furred Hou reigns supreme. Beneath the Immortal-Locking Well, however, lies a buried corpse that has nearly cultivated itself into an immortal corpse.
In the winter of the thirty-first year of the Guangxu reign, Chen Huai’an, a physician from western Hunan, is summoned to a stockade to treat an injured man who has been bitten by a jiangshi. That night, the dead man undergoes corpse transformation, turns purple all over, and lunges at everyone he sees. Taoist Zhong Daoyuan subdues and kills him with a carpenter’s ink-line and talismans, only to discover an even more horrifying truth: traces of a gold-powder corpse-suppressing talisman are embedded in the Purple Stiff’s wound.
It is a Maoshan forbidden art that has been lost for three hundred years.
The two men investigate up to the back mountain and discover an Immortal-Locking Well sealed for five hundred years. A buried corpse lies beneath it, and someone has chiseled open the well, allowing corpse qi to leak out. Gu Changsheng, the well’s guardian, tells them that someone is using the buried corpse’s power to accelerate the transformation of every jiangshi in western Hunan, all to find a vessel capable of containing its corpse qi.
The chosen vessel is Zhou Shi’an, a traveling peddler from out of town. His fiancée was hounded to death in the stockade. When he came looking for her killers, they beat him to death and dumped his body in the back mountain. Seven days after his death, his overwhelming resentment, combined with the buried corpse’s qi, transforms him from the lowest-rank Purple Stiff into a Green Stiff.
He will keep evolving: Green Stiff, Hairy Stiff, Flying Stiff… until he becomes a vessel for the buried corpse.
And with each evolution, he draws closer to revenge. And closer to losing control.
The seal on the Immortal-Locking Well has only three months left.
Zhong Daoyuan must obtain Zhou Shi’an’s heart’s blood and reseal the well before the seal collapses.
But Zhou Shi’an’s heart’s blood must be given willingly.
What could make a jiangshi consumed by resentment willingly give up his heart’s blood?
Unless someone can avenge him.
