Nineteen-year-old college student Gu Xun delivers takeout over summer vacation to save up for tuition. He has a secret he has kept hidden for nineteen years: he can sense “things” that ordinary people can’t see. The midsummer heat can’t wear him down, and he can climb a hundred flights of stairs without tiring. While the entire city grows irritable in the forty-degree heat, he remains cool and composed. He has always relied on this inborn “sense” to avoid anything abnormal. All he wants is to finish his summer deliveries in peace, save enough for tuition, and return to school.
Then he gets two suspicious delivery orders.
One is addressed to Room 603 in the old Fuan residential complex. A withered hand reaches through the door, and the chill beyond it is like a freezer. The other is an urgent order marked in red, addressed to an old house on the back street, with the note: “Leave it at the door and go.” His coworkers, Wang Lei and Li Hang, kindly offer to deliver the orders for him, but they’re dragged into the old house and nearly devoured by a monster nourished by the aura of a thousand-year-old evil bone. Gu Xun rushes in to save them and, for the first time, deliberately touches the creature’s core. It collapses on the spot, turning to ash.
But Gu Xun has changed too. A thin, dark red line has appeared on his right wrist, inching toward his heart. Zhao Jianguo, the head of Station Three, finally comes clean: this delivery station is an outpost of the Candlewick Organization, which handles “abnormal leaks” throughout the city. The red line comes from an “evil bone,” a fragment of the remains of a terrifying entity dismembered a thousand years ago. Twenty-four pieces of the evil bone are scattered across China, each one corrupting the reality around it. And Gu Xun carries a bloodline capable of “dissipating” the evil bone’s aura.
More importantly, the most dangerous fragment, a piece of the Dark Abyss Heart, is awakening somewhere in Linjiang City.
