During the Zhenguan era of the Tang Dynasty, strange cases broke out across the land: young women about to be married vanished into thin air at the hour of the ox. The doors and windows remained shut, their wedding dresses were left behind, and the only thing missing was their shadows.
Some said the brides had run away. Others claimed demons had come to marry them. But a Daoist priest insisted that no demons or ghosts were involved.
To search for his younger sister, who had been missing for seven years, umbrella maker Pei Zhaoye followed a bloodstained red thread to Suolong Village. He gradually discovered that the thread led the way, bronze mirrors revealed doorways, and the red-and-white umbrellas made by the Pei family for generations could lead to an eerie village forever frozen at the hour of the ox.
Behind the door, forty-nine wedding chairs sat waiting, empty.
Every bride taken away forgot her own name and face. The moment she answered a call from the darkness, she became a faceless bride who could never return home.
And Pei Zhaoye's parents, missing for many years, seemed to have been waiting for him beneath an umbrella all along.
This time, he would use one hand to close a door that had been devouring people for a hundred years.
