A young woman (Huang Zuyi) who just graduated college with a phd in neurobiology gets hired at the office of a medical company in Shanghai for 5 years. Naturally since she is 25 she starts to present with schizophrenia and a magical spirit world appears in her dreams. It’s just a version of the real world occupied by the spirits of people who are trapped in certain locations or objects. They live out their lives in localised delusions of places they either died in or have a connection to. Most of them are allowed to live freely just in the afterlife. When she’s awake the schizophrenia presents as these spirits (who look like regular people just opaque) talking to her and moving in regular ways. And they can’t interact with regular objects but live in delusion that they’re in a “heaven” like reality that mirrors the real world. The spirit that mainly talks to Huang is chasca, who’s kind of a default leader of the spirit world. Chasca can control how you see the other side, and how (most) spirits see the real world. She can also shapeshift into people. Huang first starts to see these delusions when she goes on a trip to Harbin to see that fancy ice city in the winter, and ends up staying in a…scarily rural hotel.