Lin Yuejian was the ninth bride chosen for the moon sacrifice. The eight before her were sent into the mountain on full-moon nights and none came back. What waited for her on the slab was not a beast but a man who spoke, chained there three hundred years ago. His name was Yin, he had kept this mountain for three centuries, and he was the man her family had sold. One drop of her blood loosened the curse an inch, and across thirty episodes she has to decide whether to open the chain all the way or leave it locked for another three hundred years.
The night the village tied her to the stone slab the moon had only just cleared the ridge. The old priest said: give her up, and the thing in the mountain will stop coming down. She listened to the copper bells fade and waited a long time, until the sound of a chain dragging over stone arrived at the edge of the slab, and a man's breathing with it. The first thing he said was: don't move, my hands are all rust.
