[Folk horror] [Passionate resistance against Japan] [Infinite Flow] [Two strong leads who save each other] [Decisive and ruthless]
In the chaos of the Republic of China, resentment filled the air. The underworld opened a theater stage to collect the souls of criminals who had escaped justice.
Li Haotian, a paper effigy maker from Nanqiao Town, awakens the “Blood-Painted Soul.”
Gu Wanhe, an orphan of a traveling opera troupe, can bind souls with his singing, and end lives with a single tune. Chosen by the Number Zero opera ticket, the two enter the Underworld Opera Troupe.
They travel through haunted domains: slaying bandits in Kowloon Walled City, battling a masked man aboard a ghost train, and breaking the Red-Clad Ghost’s scheme at a hospital where patients are skinned alive.
The Blood-Painted Soul turns paper into soldiers; write a sinner’s name on a death notice, and ghosts come to claim them. When the singing begins, evil men become paper puppets!
Their obsessions run deep, yet those same obsessions entrap them. The cracks in their paper bodies widen, but the truth is only just beginning to emerge: their fathers’ whereabouts, Japanese military experiments, and the fate of the Underworld Opera Troupe.
Once the stage is set, yin and yang reverse. Once the drums and gongs sound, a hundred ghosts obey.
I bow to neither Heaven nor Earth, and seek no gods or Buddhas. With a single paper death notice, I decide life and death; with one underworld opera, I cut down evil and delusion.
I’ll travel the streets and alleys of the Republic of China, solve bizarre cases, quell malignant spirits, and cut down every beast in human clothing, bringing justice and peace back to a troubled age.
The grievances of the living and the tangled fates of ghosts will all be settled on a three-foot stage.
The drums and gongs sound, the curtain rises. This isn’t a show, it’s a death sentence.
Anyone devoid of conscience and steeped in evil is a beast waiting to be executed onstage, doomed to have their soul scattered.
The male BOSS wears a battered mask. He kills with vicious brutality, yet always makes tiny, stuttering movements like a wooden doll.
The female BOSS wears a red opera costume and can stare into souls with ghostly eyes. Nothing grows where she passes.
The next moment, the red-clad female ghost, capable of laying waste to heaven and earth, suddenly stops.
