The Broken Mirror Case

On a stormy night in Linzhou, the bizarre corpse of a woman is discovered in Jing’an Alley. A fine silver chain is wound around her neck, her face is covered with shards of mirror, and the half of a yellowed movie ticket clutched in her hand tears open a hidden corner of the past from fifteen years ago. Detective Lin Yan follows the trail and discovers that the skin tissue beneath the victim’s fingernails matches the DNA of the sole survivor of the Red Star Cinema arson case twenty years ago. The white powder left at the scene also links to the theft of an antique bronze mirror from the city theater troupe three months earlier. As the investigation deepens, more mysteries emerge: a fox-masked figure wiping a bloodstained chain in an anonymous video, an iris-shaped symbol that keeps appearing, the film *Mystery in the Mirror* closely tied to the cases, and the mysterious Mirror Lake Sanatorium. Every clue points to an even greater conspiracy. When a second murder takes place in the same bizarre fashion, and dark dealings hidden in sealed files from an old case gradually come to light, Lin Yan realizes he is trapped in a revenge plot spanning many years. The killer has meticulously laid the groundwork, using mirrors as props and time as an axis to weave a tangled web of death. Can Lin Yan piece together the truth amid the layers of reflections and uncover the chilling secret behind this string of murders?