Su Ci, the youngest coroner in the Great Yin dynasty, discovers a shocking secret while collecting her father's body: hidden beneath the fatal ligature mark are fragments of imperial gold leaf. Xiao Jingheng, an official of the Court of Judicial Review, bursts through the door wielding an ironwood ruler and takes her to the morgue in the name of the ancestral Coroner's Red Ledger.
When a gauze-covered hand reveals the true face of a decaying corpse, she uses the length of maggots to estimate the time of death and stomach contents to pinpoint the killer's region. Yet a string of skeletal remains leads her to fragments of a succession struggle from twenty years ago. The cold-faced prince's ruler conceals a star map of the imperial mausoleum, and every rap of it counts down to someone's death.
"Your skill at examining corpses is no match for your talent for calculating people's hearts." Xiao Jingheng flings the bloodstained coroner's badge onto the table. Behind him lie a destroyed saltpeter depot and the twisted laughter of the Third Prince.
Su Ci swallows the spicy ginger pill lodged in her throat and uses a silver needle to pry open the hyoid bone of the last corpse. Embedded there is half a jade pendant engraved with a double-headed chiwen, a perfect match for the keepsake left by Xiao Jingheng's birth mother.
The dynasty's sharpest blade and the most relentless hand that wields it tear open the bloody truth between autopsy reports and an imperial confession.
When the new emperor breaks the ironwood ruler with his own hands, Su Ci enters the history books with her revised Coroner's Red Ledger. On its title page is an impression of the old wound on Xiao Jingheng's left arm, winding like the silhouette of three fingers cast by palace lanterns on a rainy night twenty years ago.
The author's writing is very good. It's really great. I look forward to the update hahahaha