Gu Bai is eighty thousand yuan in debt and dropped out of medical school. Then he unexpectedly inherits an old, run-down clinic from his great-aunt, one that conceals an ancient tomb thousands of years old. Along with it comes a strange final instruction: enter the tomb in his dreams every night and learn medicine there, then use those skills to treat the living by day.
On his first night in the tomb, cracks in the stone doors of its nine levels correspond to strange illnesses in the human world. When he wakes, he meets a worker with a dislocated finger and sets it by hand using the technique he learned in his dream. A severely injured patient, beyond even the best hospitals’ ability to treat, is able to move again on the spot after Gu Bai pieces together his shattered bones with his own hands.
More and more patients come to his door: “living corpses” covered in tomb moss, their flesh turned to wax. Gu Bai gradually discovers that the Gu family have been tomb guardians for generations, that he was born with medicinal bones, and that the blue mark on his neck is a tomb poison that devours its host. Every time he cures a living corpse, the poison spreads a little further. A deputy director at an archaeological institute secretly covets the tomb’s treasures, while the mystery of his ancestors’ disappearance and the truth behind the tomb guardians’ sacrifices slowly come to light. Su Wanqing, an emergency room doctor, sees through his unusual medical skills and stays by his side without hesitation.
Strange patients keep showing up at his door, the nine-level tomb beneath the earth holds deadly trials, and tomb raiders who covet its secrets close in at every turn. Armed with the thirteen ancestral tomb-suppressing needles, Gu Bai must uncover the tomb’s ultimate secret before the poison completely consumes him, and break the fate that has reduced generation after generation of the Gu family to medicinal offerings.
