The Bronze Tribunal

The body of an online celebrity streamer, dressed in Ming Dynasty robes, bears a tattoo of the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions on her collarbone. Its pattern matches the cracks in an ancient mirror that is a thousand years old. When Detective Captain Chen Mo wakes from a coma, he discovers that the soul of Murong Xuan, Prince of Zhenbei of the Great Zhou, has taken up residence in his consciousness. When ultraviolet light in a modern forensic lab reveals a glowing ancient poison in the body's meridians, and forensic scanners identify the murder weapon as the long-lost “Midnight Mandarin Duck Axes,” the two “twin detectives” from different eras are forced to work together.

After a bronze mirror devours the bloodstains, a prophecy of death appears on its surface. Ancient mechanisms are recreated at crime scenes, and DNA databases turn up a genetic sample from six hundred years ago… Each unsolved case tears open a rift in time. From a murder streamed live by an online celebrity to a blood sacrifice behind Nuo masks, from a case involving human-skin shadow puppets to a corpse dumped through quantum entanglement, Chen Mo and his apprentice Lin Xiaoman race against death orders from the Ming Dynasty's Imperial Guards at every crime scene. When the forensic pathologist cuts open the chest of a sacrificial victim, a star chart laser-etched onto the beating organs is unmistakably the one from the night Murong Xuan fell off a cliff.

This chain of murders spanning past and present will ultimately reveal a bloody truth: someone is using the bronze mirror's power over time to drag both the Prince of Zhenbei and the detective who is his reincarnation into the final vortex of a thousand-year-old blood sacrifice.