A long time ago, in one of the provinces of the Celestial Empire, there lived an old hermit. He mastered the secrets of magic and knew how to heal thousands of diseases. Six beautiful girls, his students, helped him in this lesson. But one day the old man lost his nobility and wisdom, and the angry gods turned the hermit and his companions into beautiful dolls with porcelain faces. For two thousand years, the cursed dolls brought misfortune and even death to their owners, and now one of them accidentally fell into the hands of an ordinary St. Petersburg woman housewife Nadezhda Lebedeva. Being inquisitive by nature and possessing a certain amount of courage and adventurism, Nadezhda plunged headlong into solving the terrible mystery...