In the 16th year of the Republic of China, Lin Zhaoxue, who had been copying obituaries for a newspaper for three years, received a high-priced letter of appointment from the Jiangnan Gu family - asking her to go to the old house and repair a genealogy that was damaged by fire.
Along with the letter came half a copper lock that she had "lost" when she was young. There is one word engraved on the back of the lock: her nickname.
Gu's house has its windows closed during the day and no red lights at night. The seventh room in the west wing is always locked and houses a bride in red who died seventeen years ago. What's even weirder is that the dead man is also named Zhaoxue.
The servants called her eldest lady in the middle of the night, and the crazy lady recognized her as her daughter. Her birth date was written on the missing page of the genealogy. The only person who advised her to leave quickly was Gu Yunzheng, the second young master in the house who could still go out: he said that the souls of people who came out of Gu's house were tied to the water.
She recalled what her mother said repeatedly to her before she died: Don't answer anyone who calls your name at night; don't look back when anyone calls you home.
She thought she saw a ghost.
It wasn't until the Gu family started calling her another name over and over again that she realized that what was really scary was not the return of the dead, but the living, being replaced by the dead bit by bit.
