[Chinese Folk Customs + Supernatural Cultivation + Eerie Mystery Cases + A Cast of Human Characters + Mutual Redemption + One Female Lead]
A bowl of hot rice suddenly appears in the General’s Shrine, which has been sealed for sixty years.
Pei Zhaoye is ordered to open the shrine and inspect it. To his surprise, the statue that has never opened its eyes steps down from the altar and bows before him.
“Your sinful god welcomes... Mr. Lu.”
But Pei Zhaoye’s surname is not Lu, and he remembers nothing of his life before the age of ten.
The people of Dayu observe three taboos when worshipping gods: if you smell the incense, the gods will hear your prayers; if you see the statue, the gods will see your face; if you exchange true names, the gods can follow the incense offerings to find your soul.
Yet the General, eyes closed, has heard a wish without smelling the incense, and recognized Pei Zhaoye without opening his eyes.
To uncover the name that does not appear in the household registers, Pei Zhaoye takes a divine talisman that devours memories and sets out with Sang Chi, a keeper of sealed incense, to investigate haunted shrines throughout the land. Clay statues open their eyes, people bring incense to abandoned villages, and a faceless Bodhisattva ferries all living beings across the river at night. The living receive the people’s offerings, while the dead awaken again and again inside their shrines.
Each time Pei Zhaoye borrows power from a god, he loses a piece of his own past. Each time Sang Chi preserves one of his names, she forgets someone she holds dear.
As they investigate, they discover that the gods enthroned high above, basking in the incense offerings of the mortal world, all seem to fear the same thing:
Pei Zhaoye remembering who he truly is.
And when at last he stands before all the gods, the heavens fill with deities closing their eyes and bowing low.
