The Ruins' Rite

Beneath the old coastal city lies a sealed ancient ruin vein, dormant for a millennium. Since the Tang and Song dynasties, successive regimes established a shrine to perform the Ruins' Rite, balancing the earth's energy and maintaining stability. In the Republic era, the shrine was destroyed and the rite ceased, shattering the thousand-year barrier and allowing invisible ruin energy to seep out along the earth veins. Folklorist Lin Yu starts a late-night livestream in the old streets, enters the abandoned shrine on Ghost Festival midnight, and encounters residual shadows, self-igniting cold candles, and a closed-loop illusion of the ruin domain. He escapes using ancient footwork from a book, only to find on replay that the footage captured many eerie traces invisible to the naked eye. As he traces the origins, long-unsolved mysteries surface: disappearances, unexplained depression, sudden deaths among young adults—all locations align with the ancient earth vein. An ancient text says: Ruin energy is formless; touch it and be cursed; enter the body and become a calamity. The man-made severance of the rite has festered, and the dormant ruin vein awakens, setting the stage for a thousand-year calamity over the entire city.