In the morning mist of late autumn, the widow Chen Xiulan surrendered with blood scissors in hand: The murderer slept in my bed last night. A corpse floating in an ancient well shows a strange death; a broken jade earring implicates a mysterious case of sudden death three years ago. As the patrol investigation deepened, the rice shop's pawn tickets, the watchman's poison jar, the scholar's English diary, and the beggar's prison mark emerged one after another - there are seventy-two households in Cangxiang Street, everyone has a secret, and everyone is a chess piece.
And Chen Xiulan is the chess player. Over the past three years, she has calmly taken advantage of the cracks in human nature: Sun Erniang's greed, Zhao Laizi's cowardice, Li Huaide's ambition, and Wang Mazi's hatred, all of which have become the sharp blades in her hands to kill people. When the codes of gold bars and Bingdilian insoles at the bottom of the well were deciphered, a shocking shady story involving smuggling by chambers of commerce and reselling of strategic materials for the Japanese army surfaced. This is not only the widow's personal hatred, but also the most sophisticated strangulation of the powerful by the weak in troubled times.
There are shadows in the water, and in the shadows are human hearts. The well is dry and the debt is unpaid. When all the criminals died in the game she arranged, and she herself was also the most critical bait in the game - this revenge that used flesh and blood as a bargaining chip,
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
