The Resentment Bell

Resentment Strikes the Bell is a long supernatural suspense romance novel by Wei Yu, first serialized on Jinjiang Literature City starting in 2011 and totaling roughly 800,000 Chinese characters. The story revolves around a peculiar string of wind chimes: they can be rung only by the resentment of the dead, and their sound conveys the unfulfilled wishes and obsessions of the departed to the bell keeper. The protagonist, Ji Tangtang—whose real name is Sheng Xia—is the Road Bell keeper of her generation. From birth she has lived a wandering life, carrying the chimes through remote and desolate places to help the dead find release from their resentment, and in doing so drawing ever closer to the truth of her mother's murder and her own origins. The novel unfolds through linked episodic tales such as "Bone-Eating," "Roots," "Flying Apsaras," and "Black Butterfly," with its plot roaming across Garna, Tibet, Dunhuang, and northern Tibet, as the chimes draw out a century-long feud among occult families including the Sheng and the Qin. On her journey she meets and comes to rely on Yue Feng, yet the two families' old grudges repeatedly plunge them into danger. She must fight the conspiracy to use resentment to forge ghost bells, and also confront her own choices in the face of fate. Weaving together travelogue, folk legends, and emotional bonds, the book moves beyond its eerie atmosphere to portray how a young woman heals and grows through one life-and-death trial after another.