Fu Chen, the “Cold-Faced Yama” of Jiangcheng’s Criminal Investigation Division, carries the shadow of his father’s death in the line of duty. Amid the eerie black roses of a serial murder case, he catches a familiar scent.
Su Jing, a brilliant forensic pathologist and professor of criminal psychology, joins the case as a special consultant. Coolly rational, he bears a mysterious scar beneath his collarbone.
A series of murders, each as flawless as a work of art, draws the two into a nail-biting game of chess:
Fluorescent blood flowing through victims’ bodies, a bronze gate to an underwater laboratory, a double-helix code etched into their genes... Every clue points to the “Black Rose Project” of thirty years ago.
And they turn out to be its only two survivors.
Former enemies turned partners? Is symbiosis a shackle?
Su Jing’s serum is hidden in Fu Chen’s gun barrel, while Fu Chen’s genes are engraved on Su Jing’s scalpel.
When the victims’ genetic profiles reveal their DNA sequences, the two discover that solving the case is merely the tip of the iceberg of the Lu family’s “Nirvana Project.” From genetic seeds in a Japanese military laboratory in 1943 to interstellar seeding aboard a quantum spacecraft, Fu Chen and Su Jing are living keys spanning time and space, the ultimate product of a century-long entanglement between alien civilization and human genetic engineering.
“Symbiosis progress: 99%. Is the final 1% loving you, or killing you?”
When truth becomes a rose plunged into the heart, and love and hate turn into traps encoded in their genes, this time-spanning “withering trial” will ultimately burn a quantum nebula to ashes, where it will ask:
What is free will? What does it mean to live in the face of death?
