A four-hundred-year-old alley, a well that has been sealed three times, and a death count that never stops.
Li Xiangyang, the demolition team leader, dug out an ancient well under the old locust tree in Huaishu Lane with the words "Do not open this well" engraved on it. He thought it was just a stone blocking the road and he could just move it away.
He does not believe in evil. Until the broken piece of porcelain fished out from the bottom of the well said something to his ear late at night——
"Count down to the seventh one."
Reporter Song Zhiyi tracked down the story for six years, looking through old newspapers and local chronicles from the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, just to find a journalist who disappeared in Huaishu Lane 120 years ago - Shen Bo'an. The last words he left were exactly the same as what Li Xiangyang heard.
Two people who had nothing to do with each other were tied together because of this well.
They began to search down the cracks in time. In the twenty-third year of Guangxu's reign, seven people died in an alley within thirty days. The causes of death were different, but the manner of death was surprisingly consistent - their eyes were wide open, their mouths were wide open, and a well was reflected in the depths of their pupils.
In 1975, an old lady died by the well. Her son went down the well to salvage relics, and found densely packed names on the well wall, carved from top to bottom for hundreds of years. The name at the bottom, which was still inked in ink, was his mother's.
And now, the well is counting again. One, two, three, four...
With each count, there is less sound in the alley. The sparrows stopped chirping. The dog stopped barking. The shadow of the old locust tree is getting longer and longer day by day, as if something is crawling out inch by inch.
Li Xiangyang realized that they were not investigating an old case
