On the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, the gates of hell swing wide, the Mountains and Seas awaken, and modern civilization collapses overnight. Zou Xuan, a folk-customs short-video creator, returns to his hometown for a funeral just as the Zou clan ancestral hall is being demolished. His relatives scramble to sign the papers and split the money. He only wants to finish the funeral and leave this village, trapped by old traditions. But after midnight, the dead return home, ancestral graves split open, and a yellow-spring road of white paper appears at the village entrance, forcing everyone to flee into the ancestral hall. At the critical moment, Zou Xuan finds an old genealogy beneath his grandmother’s coffin. By chance, he awakens the Zou ancestral hall and becomes its last guardian. From then on, the genealogy can identify ghosts, record good and evil, and pass judgment on sins; ancestral teachings can become laws that protect the living; and offerings of incense can summon ancestral spirits to suppress evil and slay ghosts. While others in the apocalypse rely on supernatural powers and guns to build fortresses, Zou Xuan establishes an ancestral domain through the ancestral hall, gathers heroic spirits through the genealogy, and uses his ancestors to hold back the Mountains and Seas. But he soon discovers that not every ancestral hall protects its descendants. Some evil shrines devour offerings, some clan leaders sacrifice the living in their ancestors’ names, and some old powers protect only their bloodlines, not humanity. As strange beasts from the Mountains and Seas return to the mortal world, the ancient secrets of the great family names gradually emerge. Zou Xuan, once a guardian who only wanted to protect Zou Village, takes step after step toward founding a new ancestral sanctuary where all surnames stand together in its defense.
