On the winter solstice of the twelfth year of Chenghua, a strange case of "a copper bird carrying a corpse" suddenly appeared in the capital. The Hongwu Tongbao in the mouth of the deceased was glowing with blood, and the arrangement of copper coins on the door lintel coincided with the astrology of the earthen fortress - this was just the beginning of a bloody chess game that spanned the imperial power, factory guards, and vassal kings. Lu Chen, a member of the Jin Yiwei family, discovers his sister's hairpin at the scene of a murder, but is involved in the power strangulation of Wang Zhi of the West Factory and Shang Ming of the East Factory; when Bai Heng Rong, the "faceless man" of the West Factory, disguises himself to investigate the case, he glimpses his surprising connection with the secret history of abortion twenty years ago from under the gilt mask given by Concubine Wan Gui;
This is a feast of monsters and intrigues, as well as a lament for human nature under feudal imperial power. Each monster corpse is an abandoned piece on the imperial chessboard, and each character is struggling between "becoming a chess piece" and "overturning the chessboard." When the last page of the demon book is burned and the golden scale powder falls on the history books of the Zhengde Dynasty, readers will see: the so-called demon book is never printed words on paper, but the imperial power itself that sits on the dragon chair, forever refining the "medicine" and weaving illusions.
