The Shadow of Blackwater Village

Folklore scholar Lin Mo receives a letter from his father, who has been missing for seven years. The paper has yellowed, and the handwriting trembles: "The shadows of Heishui Village are no legend." Those nine words lead him deep into the mountains of southeastern Guizhou, to a village almost cut off from the outside world: Heishui Village, a place whose name cannot even be found on a map.

The village is shrouded in eternal mist, and its residents follow ancient taboos outsiders cannot understand: never go out on a full-moon night, never look in a mirror for more than three seconds, and most importantly, never look back to check your own shadow. Lin Mo assumes it is all ignorant superstition, until he sees his neighbor, Old Wang, get "swallowed" by his own shadow in front of a crowd.

As he investigates, Lin Mo finds a terrifying pattern recorded in his father's research notes: every nineteen years, someone in the village mysteriously disappears, and every missing person claimed to have "seen another self" before dying. Beneath the village's abandoned ancestral hall lies the truth behind a massacre that wiped out an entire family a century ago. Its walls are covered in the same words, carved over and over: "It's here. It's become me."

When Lin Mo finally discovers what happened to his father, he finds no answers, only something even more horrifying: the shadow that has followed him for thirty years is smiling at him...