Gu Qingru left the Gu family since she was a child, and her only memory of the old house is fear. On the night of her mother's funeral, she found a bloody genealogy page under the mourning hall. The names that had been crossed out died one after another - it was her turn next. Shen Yan, the guardian of the mausoleum, suddenly appeared and warned her about "things that should not be touched", but disappeared into the rainy night when she asked. From then on, Gu Qingru was trapped in the maze-like corridors and secret rooms of the old house, step by step approaching the truth about the Gu family's "human sacrifice".
As the investigation deepens, Gu Qingru discovers that the Gu family has used a "twin blood contract" to maintain the family's destiny for generations: each generation must sacrifice a pair of twins, one to bear the pain and the other to nourish the soul. The person who controls all this is actually the seemingly kind grandmother Gu Xu. She imprisoned Gu Qingru's sister, used the baby's bones to make bronze nails, made the tomb-keepers of the Shen family into puppets, and even pushed Gu Qingru's mother into a well, just to let the cauldron soul parasitize in the blood of her closest relatives and live forever.
Shen Yan used his fate as a guide to help Gu Qingru reverse the blood contract. In the underground palace of the ancestral hall, the secret passage of the dry well, and the locust tree forest, the two of them started a life-and-death fight with Mrs. Gu's paper-man army and the bronze-nailed resentful spirits. In the end, Gu Qingru used herself as a cauldron, fused with her mother's remnant soul, gouged out her grandmother's eyes on a blood moon night, burned the sacrifice list, and exposed the Gu family's century-old sins to the public.
Intention: Abandonment of blindly following the old system, questioning individual dignity and free will