In the first year of the Tianshou era, rumors of monsters and restless spirits spread as strange incidents erupt across the countryside. When a retired official, Jiang Biejia, is robbed and murdered during a highly ritualized ancestral-tomb ceremony, the dying man scrawls the words "Demon-Subduing Curse", insisting a "demon" will return to kill the true culprit in vengeance. Summoned to investigate, Di Renjie AKA Detective Dee traces the crime to a trail of missing relics: Jiang had recently paid a suspicious sum to a mysterious hunchback, Sun Tuobei, for a cache of "family treasures," which are then stolen in the attack.