The countdown to Tong Yao's college entrance examination stopped at 7 days. When she fainted in the mock examination room, what she was waiting for was not a review of the test paper, but a cancer diagnosis certificate. The pain of chemotherapy and the despair about the future dragged her into the abyss. When her consciousness was blurred, she heard a babbling drama. When she opened her eyes again, she was already in an old and dilapidated "weird theater".
There is no cure here, only drama performances with lives at stake. Each copy is a forgotten Chinese horror legend:
- "Embroidered Shoes": Playing the role of a maid in a deep house, looking for the missing red embroidered shoes at midnight. The song "Moonlight illuminates the hall, a pair of embroidered shoes embroidered with mandarin ducks..." Circulating in the corridor hides the resentment of the bride who was buried alive.
- "Paper Man Village": Become a mourner from outside, face the strange gaze of the paper men in the village, break the folk taboo of "paper man exchanging lives", and be wary of those paper men who will blink secretly on rainy nights.
- "Bone Flute Ballad": Become a tomb keeper and play the incomplete bone flute in the ancient tomb. Every wrong note will wake up a tomb guard figurine with a decaying atmosphere, and the warning will sound in your ears: "When the bone flute sounds, the souls of the dead will descend. If you make a wrong step, you will be buried in yellow beams."
When she first entered the theater, Tong Yao had no strength to tie a chicken and could only tremble when faced with the strange phenomena in the copy. But seeing her teammates "erased" from the theater due to mistakes, and listening to the words of the medical certificate echoing repeatedly in her mind, she clenched her fists - instead of waiting to die in the hospital, it was better to fight for a way out in the theater.
The idea: to use folk horror legends as a carrier to explore the "human obsession behind fear" - the strange phenomena in the dungeon are not simply symbols of horror, but the embodiment of "resentment, regret, and greed" in past tragedies. The protagonist's process of cracking the dungeon is also the answer to the riddle of human nature.