On the island of Taiwan, the indigenous Seediq Tribe lives high on Mount Wushe. They are fabled to have been borne from the fusion of giant trees and huge rocks thousands of years ago. Only those tribesmen who have survived a severe trial earn the honor to be tattooed on the face and become a "Seediq Bale" (or real Seediq). These marks, too, signify that they may one day cross the rainbow bridge to join with the ancestors' ancient souls and receive eternal life.

In 1895, the Japanese Empire began to govern its new colony, Taiwan. The forested mountains, the lands of the ancestral spirits, were scarred by the colonizers' demand for the harvest of the stately camphor trees. Chief Mona Rudao led his people to submit to the well-armed Japanese authorities in order to survive the oppression.

Under the rule of the Japanese, the Seediq were forced to give up not only their sacred lands, but also their religion, way of life, and tattoos, their marks of honor and pride. While Mona Rudao initially believed that his tribesmen would be saved if they bowed their heads to the hegemony, he finally realized that giving up everything - their pride and spirit - would cause the Seediq to vanish.

Therefore, Mona Rudao changed his outlook as the tribal chief and as a warrior. Untamed and unrelenting, he encouraged the young tribesmen to once again earn the right to wear the tattoos on their faces, to be a real, proud Seediq Bale and fight against the overlords. On October 27, 1930, the vengeance of the Wushe Incident exploded. With unbridled fury, the Seediq braves attacked and slaughtered all the Japanese on the blood-soaked mountain in order to reclaim their lands and regain their freedom.

The Japanese colonial government was furious. They resurrected hatred between the Seediq and neighboring tribes, in order that they would wage war against each other. Further, overpowering numbers of well-armed Japanese soldiers and aerial bombardment with chemical weapons sought to terminate all tribes. Hence, the Seediq were facing imminent defeat, death approaching at the hands of the Japanese Army.

The women and children of the Seediq hanged themselves, on the trees, in order to allow the Seediq warriors to concentrate on fighting (rather than worrying about their families). With all hearts set on honor, Seediq warriors were unfortunately slain one by one or committed suicide. In the end, the last 298 Seediq were imprisoned on Chuan Island, between Bac Gang Stream and Mei Yuan Stream. The motherland was ravaged and fractured.

As for Mona Rudao, his body was found four years later, hanged at Maho Hill, legend telling that only half the body was decayed. The surviving Seediq people believe that half of the Warrior-God Mona Rudao led his people across the rainbow bridge to be with their ancestors in eternal life. The other half of him will stay to watch over all the Seediq offspring. Mona Rudao's fervent, eternal spirit will forever guide his people living in Taiwan.

On February 28, 1947 Taiwanese rose up against the oppressive and corrupt Chinese trustee government put in place by the allies following WWII. This event would become known as the 228 Massacre and would deeply pierce into the heart of Taiwanese society like a chilling wind. The events in late February and early March culminated in a brief period of Taiwanese control over their island. Then, on March 9, the 21st Division of heavily armed Chinese troops landed in the northern port of Keelung, sparking a bloody massacre of innocent civilians that continued unabated for weeks. The troops marched south and arrived in the central city of Taichung on March 13 under the cover of light armor and mounted machineguns. In a brave effort to resist the Chinese forces, several young people in central Taiwan formed a volunteer militia, known as the 27th Brigade.

Phuann Tsing-guan was a young man from the Sing-Ling Temple, who, it was said, could traverse the veil between the worlds of Heaven and Hell. He was known as the most capable medium for channelling the ghostly Eight Generals who protected his temple. When his partners in the troupe left to join the rebels of the 27th Brigade in fighting back the Chinese invaders, Tsing-guan made a solemn pact with them that he would leave his earthly body in the basement of Sing-Ling Temple to enter into the spirit world and steal the Book of Life and Death from Hell’s deepest and most blood-soaked pits. His purpose was to wield the sacred book as a weapon to control life and death in the mortal world and to protect his comrades’ lives in the eventual defeat of the tyrannical regime, which had brought murder and bloodshed.

Tsing-guan slipped between the worlds of life and death into the first layer of the Hell of the Mirror of Retribution, where he saw Taiwanese souls falling by the thousand into the void like a black rain. He was shocked to discover the brutality of the massacre was much more cruel and severe than he could ever have imagined. Moreover, those spirits, which had just suffered being flayed alive by the soldiers’ bayonets and humiliated before execution, still had to confront the tortures of Hell; an endless labyrinth of blood-caked punishment and bone scraping horrors. Tsing-guan realized his responsibility to his people, a realization that ignited his Godly Destiny, an unearthly power allowing him to smash through the gates separating the ghostly levels from the darkest, blackest reaches of Hell.

Before Tsing-guan could retrieve the Book of Life and Death, the Ghost King from the Tenth Level of Hell sent his ghostly mob to Sing-Ling Temple to freeze Tsing-guan's mortal body and prevent him from unleashing Hell’s power into the world. Tsing-guan fiercely fought the legions of gods and ghosts, which hurled their contorted bodies in his path.

By March 16 there were only 40 remaining members of the 27th Brigade, which had been hunted down and eliminated by the overwhelming Chinese force. They retreated back to Sing-Ling Temple to prepare for a final bloody confrontation with over 2,500 Chinese regulars.

With wars being waged in both the spirit and mortal worlds, ghosts howled in horror and delight at the death and pain around them. The event marked a cataclysm between the worlds as forces, living and dead, clashed in what is known on Earth and in Hell as the Last Stand at Oo-gu-lam.

The Taiwanese volunteers were eventually ripped apart by the Chinese military, which outnumbered them by a ratio of 60 to 1. Tsing-guan’s body of flesh, which lay in the basement of Sing-Ling Temple, had survived the fighting unharmed, but his supernatural powers were revoked by the ghosts and gods from Hell for his intransigence. His soul returned to his body, but he was forbidden, at the risk of severe punishment, to return to the spirit world. Upon seeing the bodies of his comrades and family lying in the battlefield and his village reduced to ashes, Tsing-guan was devastated, taking his own life in a bid to re-enter hell. He hoped to reclaim the Book of Life and Death to avenge his friends and all the Taiwanese who died during the short-lived war of resistance. The tyrannical government also had to die.

As soon as his soul crossed over, Tsing-guan shot directly back to the Tenth Level of Hell. His anger blazed incandescent, radiating the full spectrum of his supernatural power. It was not enough, and Tsing-guan succumbed to the forces sent by the King of Hong-do, the ghostly city, and by the King of the Charred Face, who was actually one of the forms taken by Guan yim; the goddess of mercy. Tsing-guan was eventually subdued and stripped of his powers.

Tsing-guan had breached the sacred border between the mortal world and Hell, and therefore, the ultimate punishment was bestowed upon him. He was to become the Mirror of Retribution’s eternal guardian; the sole custodian of a massive polished glass, reflecting the evils committed by earthly souls in a searing grotesque spectrum, as they pass through Hell’s dreaded gates.

For the first ten years he gazed into the mirror at the deaths of his friends being tortured and killed by the tyrannical regime. In the first sixty years he gazed into the mirror at the overthrow of the tyrannical regime that had ruined his land. For another thousand years he gazed into the mirror as a new tyranny arose and became a blight upon the land. For another ten thousand years he balefully gazed into the mirror, glassy-eyed at the lingering demise of the human race. Still, he gazed into the searing images reflecting in the mirror for another one hundred million years as a new “life body” emerged onto the polluted grounds of the wretched earth. Tsing-guan gazed for one billion more years as countless souls passed through every manifestation of creature, between gaps of nothingness, until the six channels of transmigration finally came to an end. And, although there was nothing more to see in the mirror, he continued to gaze; eyes fixed on the void reflecting back at him.

After hundreds of millions of years, when time and space reach a final accounting and collapse into one, when the last soul in Hell serves its final sentence, all the ghosts, gods and asuras disappear as if they never existed, Tsing-guan will continue gazing into the mirror as the last soul in the universe… slowly fading into the nothingness from whence we all came, in front of the Mirror of Retribution, until the end of his sentence is served and his reflection fades into shadow, and the shadow fades into the last memory of all that ever was, and the memory fades into a distant echo… and then…. Nothing.

On December 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire Asia-Pacific was engulfed in the flames of all-out war. In the wake of some key military defeats, the Japanese stranglehold on its vast empire was beginning to crumble, forcing Japan’s military leaders to recruit thousands of Taiwanese youth for military service. By that time, Taiwan had been ruled by Japan for nearly half a century and many Taiwanese were eager to fight the Americans, just as they had been instructed to do in school.

Wubus Bawan was an orphan whose parents were both killed during the Wushe insurrection against the Japanese government a decade earlier. As the Japanese strengthened their hold over the mountains, they sought to wrest more control over, not just the Seediq, but over all the Taiwanese in an effort to destroy their prior identities and replace them with a new Japanese imperial identity. They spared little effort in grooming a new generation of Seediq youth to learn the “Japanese Spirit” and become loyal subjects of an Empire that had hunted down and killed their fathers less than a decade before. Although these young men did not mark their faces with the dark tattoos of their fathers, their young minds were trapped in the searing torment of purgatory between their Seediq and Japanese Imperial identities.

At the age of twenty, Wubus decided to affirm his identity and join his Seeqiq comrades by enlisting in the Takasago Army; a group of soldiers recruited from several indigenous villages who signed up to join andfight with the Japanese Imperial Army. They, along with thousands of other Taiwanese soldiers, were to be sent into the battlefields of the Pacific theater, and engage in some of the heaviest fighting. These brave soldiers fought with tenacity and valor in an effort to demonstrate their commitment to the Japanese Empire as loyal citizens, and also to steel their minds in the crucible of combat.

The Takasago soldiers were descendents of a brave and powerful people from the mountains with a strong warrior tradition. They impressed their rivals with cunning, tenacity and skill on the battlefield to become the most revered and feared combat unit in the Japanese Imperial Army. For the first time, Wubus was treated to a taste of respect and admiration from the Japanese colonists. Through his bravery on the field of battle, he also found a sense of freedom to put his troubled mind at ease. Finally, Wubus felt a sense of release from his inner fight for identity and realized that he had fulfilled his sacred obligation to his ancestors to test himself in war and become complete as a Seediq man.

However, with the worsening of the situation, Japan kept losing in the war, and The Takasago soldiers had been seriously injured as well, including the Kaoru Airborne Unit, in which the whole crew volunteered for a suicide mission. On August 15, 1945 the great Empire of Japan surrendered to the Allies. Wubus and his surviving comrades in the Takasago volunteers returned home from service and resumed their lives high in the mountains of Taiwan.

Although Wubus was hoping for peace, the situation of Taiwan after the war was actually the opposite. As a result of the armistice, Taiwan was turned over as a trustee to the United Nations. The Japanese ruling era was ended, but an outside political force had stepped in right after. After two years of abuse and maladministration, Taiwan’s soil was again blackened in the blood of the 228 Massacre(*). Chiang Kai-sheck’s Chinese forces arrived at Keelung Harbor and immediately engaged in an orgy of killing that brought the stain of death to the Taiwanese from North to South. The young people living on the western plain organized a Taiwanese civilian militia to fight the overwhelming Chinese force. These brave, young patriots also carried a desperate plea to the mountains of Wushe, with the hope of recruiting the brave Takasago Army to join in the fight and defend their common homeland. For hundreds of years the ruling governments of Taiwan rose and fell like the grasses on the plain. The only thing that remained unchanged was their oppression of Taiwan's people. Therefore, Wubus and the Takasago Army agreed to join the Taiwanese civilian militia and defend Taiwan from the random violence committed by the Chinese forces.

Vastly outnumbered by waves of Chinese soldiers, the Taiwanese civilian militia sustained defeat after bloody defeat. When the violence neared its end only a handful of militia soldiers remained alive. The last staggering remnants of Taiwan’s defenders pulled back to seek cover inside the Sing-Ling Temple as thousands of Chinese troops advanced upon the area to sate their thirst for vengeance. One of the ragged militiamen was Phuann Tsing-guan(*), a young man from the Shing Ling Temple, who chose to use his powers as a spirit medium to traverse the veil between Heaven and Hell and channel the ghostly Eight Generals who protected his temple in a desperate attempt to help him save the lives of his comrades and change Taiwan's bitter fate. With the dead and the dying all around, Wabus Bawan and the Takasago Army stood their ground and fought to the very last man. Each of the hardened rebels faced down the Chinese enemy as a martyr to protect Phuann Tsing-guan, whose physical body was lying fast in the basement of the Sing-Ling Temple.

Before crossing the chasm of death, Wubus prayed to the spirits of his ancestors, asking them to protect Phuann Tsing-guan, and to help him complete his mission in guarding the descendents of his land -- to free them from oppression and tyranny. As a final act Wubus Bawan used his bare hands to carve two long wounds deep into his face. The lines scratched in his forehead and chin both sparkled with honor. He held up his hands, dyed red with the blood of his vanquished enemy, and so the Utux gratefully led him across into death as Seediq Bale.

Tan Beng-thong, the owner of a tea farm that was passed down from generation to generation in placed called Chulosan, saved the life of Chiu A-si, a man in despair, and the two became sworn brothers. However, Tan did not know that Chiu, the man he saved, is going to cause the fall of Tan's family.

Under the rule of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was considered by the imperial court as an "uncivilized territory" that in which the laws and the imperial authority did not apply. Because of that, many Chinese merchants, bandits, and pirates took the advantage of the situation and came to Taiwan to seize whatever they could. Chiu, a merchant from Shantou, China, was one of such, and Tan's help to Chiu had created a favorable opportunity to Chiu. Casting greedy eyes on Tan's wealth and desired his wife Lee Chiao-niu, Chiu single-handedly planned a plot and murdered Tan, and raped Chao-niu. Felt humiliated, Lee ended her own life by hanging herself on a screw pine tree. But Chiu wasn't satisfied, he secretly went on to plan another plot to kill Tan's son A-liong, wanting to destroy the entire Family of Tan.

Having fallen into the Underworld, Chiao-niu could still feel that her son's life was at stake, and used her ghostly power to liberate herself from the Underworld, and returned to the human world to save her son. But when Chiao-niu's spirit arrived at the Tan Family Mansion, she only found that her son was already murdered, all the family's wealth was taken, and Chiu A-si had escaped to China. Chiao-niu's soul was awakened by the deep pain that she felt, and became determined to seek revenge for her son in China.

At the same time, Chiao-niu was placed on the wanted list by both the Heaven and the Underworld, as she broke all the rules that divided the world of the living and the world of the dead. Heavenly and ghostly soldiers were all mobilized and dispatched to catch Chiao-niu. After several fierce battles, Chiao-niu finally reached Shantou in China, killed Chiu, and turned his families into dead bodies or insanity.

Finally revenged for her son, Chiao-niu was now peaceful again in her heart, and her soul could finally rest.

However, all of a sudden, Chiao-niu was breathing and was in a human body again. In shock, Chiao-niu found herself in the master bedroom in Tan's mansion, and her husband Tan Beng-thong was asking her to bring some treats to a friend whom he just saved--Chiu A-si.

It turns out that, because of the killings she has done in the Underworld, in Heaven, and in the human world, Chiao-niu was penalized by deities in the Heaven and in the Underworld to be perpetuated into the relentless recurrence of tragic fate and revenge.