She awakens not on a bed, but on a cold, obsidian floor inside a colossal hall. The "Ma Cung" is alive—its pillars breathe, and the tapestries depict scenes of impossible battles between divine beings and shadow monsters.

"Cuối cùng con cũng đã trở về. Lần này, không phải là mẹ của ta nữa... mà là vợ của ta." ("Finally, you have returned. This time, not as my mother... but as my wife.")

As Ngoc finishes the chant, reality cracks . The walls of her room peel away like dead skin. The floor turns into a swirling vortex of shadows. She feels a cold, sentient presence wrap around her ankle. It is not a force—it is a being .

The ritual claims that at the exact hour of the "Shadow Moon" (a lunar eclipse), if a person with a pure but broken heart performs the ceremony, they will be pulled into the Ma Cung to "complete an unfinished contract" from a past life.

Chapter 1, titled "The Call of the Abyss" (or similar, depending on translation), opens not in a magical realm, but in the mundane, gray reality of modern-day Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. The heroine, (often shortened to Ngoc), is a university student majoring in ancient history with a secret obsession: folk exorcism rituals and ancient scripts.