The Strange Lamp of the Underworld: Chronicles of the Spirit-Suppressing Bureau

In the Great Yong Dynasty, in the twenty-seventh year of Yongchang, lamplight at midnight became a death curse. Wherever oil lamps went out for no reason, someone would be found burned to a crisp, with half a flaming lotus branded on their throat. Lu Zhaoming, a ninth-rank Supervising Censor, was in truth the soul of a modern forensic pathologist. He discovered that it was all connected to the royal heir switch twenty years ago.

By day, he was an obscure minor official at court, watching the newly crowned top scholar Pei Ji decide life and death with his brush. By night, he and the mute girl Bai Jinghong ventured into the mysterious ghost market, where they discovered that Bai Jinghong's embroidery needle could foretell the future. When black blood seeped from the Ministry of Works' Bell of the Nation, and corpse-like blotches spread across the Astronomical Observatory's star-gazing platform, Lu Zhaoming finally understood: this was a conspiracy spanning a thousand years, with a shocking secret hidden behind it.