When Yu Jiuniang opened her eyes inside the coffin, a blood moon hung over the eaves of the ancestral shrine. A century of imprisonment had revived her in a cold, dead body, and her entire clan was to be her sacrifice. Xie Linyuan stood by her side, watching helplessly as she tore up the contract, pulled out the nails, and killed her own kin. Liu Qiniang's paper effigies began to weep. Yun Yin Granny's blood talismans spread in silence. In the night wind, Xie Wujiu's suona played the name she had never spoken aloud. She wasn't a scapegoat. She was the destiny that had been buried. When all seven nails are returned to their places, who will be the true sacrifice?
After Yu Jiuniang awakens, she kills one person for every soul-sealing nail she retrieves. Their corpses revive with resentment, and Yin energy surges like a tide through the Yu clan shrine. Xie Linyuan secretly guides her around the clan's traps, but Xie Wujiu repeatedly disrupts his concentration with his suona, luring her into the depths of a blood curse. Liu Qiniang seizes the chance to offer up twelve sets of ashes, hoping to trade her life for Yu Jiuniang's through a soul-substitution ritual, but Yu Granny instead turns her into a new sacrifice. Yun Yin Granny draws the “Yin Heir Seal” in blood, revealing that Yu Jiuniang is actually the living key to an ancient seal binding the earth's ley lines. The so-called sacrifices are merely vessels for the reincarnation of successive Yin heirs. To prolong her life, Yu Granny plans to use Liu Qiniang's soul to forge the Yin Pact anew, forcing Xie Linyuan to choose between saving Yu Jiuniang and destroying the contract. When the final soul nail is driven into Yu Jiuniang's heart, she turns its point toward the ley lines beneath the ancestral shrine. The true sacrifice, it turns out, is the entire clan, which has prolonged its life for a century with innocent blood. The contract shatters, the underworld falls apart, and Xie Wujiu's suona falls silent. Yet in the wind, Yun Yin Granny's blood talisman slowly traces a new name...
