At the first snowfall in the capital, bone-reader Xie Tingzhou receives an unlit bone lantern.
Its owner is he himself, and his death is due tomorrow.
The bone lantern can reveal the strongest obsession a deceased person had during the final seven minutes of their life. But every time Xie Tingzhou lights it, he loses a piece of his own memory.
In the lantern, he sees the cold-blooded death-row prisoner Pei Zhaoye drive a knife into his heart with his own hands. Yet Pei Zhaoye is to be executed tomorrow at dawn. There is no way he could live until the hour of the rat, as the vision foretells.
Xie Tingzhou rushes to the prison that night. Through the bars, a man he has never met calls him by the childhood name the world has forgotten.
“A Zhou, why have you forgotten me again?”
One man keeps forgetting; the other is forced to remember the lives of countless dead. Forced to join forces to investigate the “unclaimed bone lanterns,” they gradually discover that the peace of the entire dynasty has been bought with the names and memories of millions.
Later, Xie Tingzhou forgets his home, his old grudges, and Pei Zhaoye.
Pei Zhaoye simply places the lantern back in his hands. “You don’t have to remember me. Just choose again.”
One lantern illuminates white bones; one man shepherds another through the long night. Some would have the world forget its suffering. They insist on preserving the names of the forgotten.
