In the twentieth year of the Republic, Shen Du, the last clerk of the Yin Talisman Bureau, is ordered to travel to western Hunan to investigate the disappearance of seven corpse-driving caravans. He expects nothing more than an ordinary haunting, but in the ancestral hall of Yongshun County, he discovers that every name on every memorial tablet in the entire city has been changed. When the Three Pure Ones statues in a Taoist temple begin to weep, and scales quietly appear on the golden statue in a Buddhist temple, he finally understands: the so-called gods and Buddhas of this world are merely shadows cast by the Old Ones. Each time he gazes into the abyss, he grows further removed from humanity. Those who suppress the Old Gods will, in the end, become vessels for them.
