Outside the City God Temple in the Great Zhou Dynasty, Lin Wuya clutches half a moldy divination tube and stares at the “uncanny fortune-teller” sign crushed beneath people’s feet. As the crowd spits out insults, calling him a fraud who leads people astray, who would guess that this pathetic good-for-nothing was once a modern programmer who worked himself to death coding?
Then, one night, as he gnaws on a cold bun in a dilapidated temple, a mechanical voice suddenly booms in his mind: “Heavenly Secrets Compass successfully bound!” An ancient bronze disc floats in midair, its needle suddenly spinning backward. Could the code he learned in his past life really decipher the Book of Changes of Lianshan?
Could the criminal investigation techniques he learned in the modern era really solve cold cases?
So, at the scene of the capital’s number one cold case, “The Woman in the Dry Well,” he squats by the well with a blade of grass between his lips. “The victim’s shoes smell of jasmine face powder. The killer must be the bookkeeper at a cosmetics shop.” In the Ministry of Justice’s courtroom, he teases the minister’s son with a battered fan. “That jade pendant of yours is a fake. The real one’s been under a brothel madam’s bed in the south of the city for three years.”
Then there’s Su Yingxue, the brothel’s top courtesan, who prods him in the waist with a mechanical bird. “Why pretend to be useless? My mechanisms can see right through your little schemes.” The adorable coroner Leng Xiangning tugs at his sleeve. “Brother Lin, doesn’t this corpse smell just like the old man who was selling sugar paintings on the street the other day?”
When the private soldiers of a hypocritical Confucian scholar gather outside the city, and undercurrents from the cultivation world threaten to shatter the illusion of peace, Lin Wuya touches the compass and smiles. Who says fortune-tellers can only swindle people out of money?
In this life, he’ll show everyone what it means to go from good-for-nothing to master of the Heavenly Secrets!
