The film continues to blend myths, legends, literature and folktales to further expand his narrative of history and weird tales. The story, set in Sichuan cuisine, is divided into four parts: a funeral banquet more than 4,000 years ago in which a grandmother cuts off her own tail to give to her children and grandchildren; a Spring Festival more than 3,000 years ago in which an ancestor king returns in the guise of a bird and is crucified at the banquet; a Mid-Autumn feast in the 1990s in which the gods gather to pay tribute to a millennia-old poet; and a birthday banquet in which a wandering child meets the gods of the underworld .