In the late autumn of 1946, a once-in-a-century storm turned the Chen Shui Manor in Jiangnan into an island. Eight guests of different backgrounds were invited to a banquet, only to receive a blood-written children's rhyme at midnight, signed "The Wronged Ghost of Chen Shui": "One copper coin locks you in a deep cell, the abacus beads snap and blood spills from your throat; two copper coins tear a man's guts, the rice jar sinks to the bottom and the pocket watch stops..." The eight little wooden figurines on the altar mysteriously vanished. Then came the deaths, each matching the rhyme exactly.
A retired judge was strangled by a gilt abacus, its beads lodged in his throat spelling out "1937.12.13," the date Wu Mingxiu, a salt merchant from Wumen, was executed. The owner of a rice shop drowned inside a sealed sack of rice. Beneath the inscription "Gift from Shen Bainian" on the pocket watch cover, someone had scraped away the surface to reveal the original inscription: "Seal of Wu Mingxiu." The embroidery shop owner's wife was pierced through the throat by twelve Xiangfei bamboo embroidery needles, while the stitches on the embroidery frame, depicting a pair of lotus blossoms growing from one stem, had twisted into the shape of white plum blossoms... Beside each body lay copper coins engraved with numbers. The murder weapons were everyday objects such as abacuses, embroidery needles, and xuan paper, all concealing lethal poisons and deadly mechanisms.
On the attic, Lu Manshu, a female doctor who had studied abroad, found an old photo album. In a faded photograph, Wu Mingxiu's daughter wore a jadeite safety charm identical to her own. The crack in the jade bracelet on Madam Lin Ruomei's wrist matched exactly the injury Wu Mingxiu's wife had sustained when she struck something before drowning herself in the lake. In a hidden drainage tunnel beneath Mirror Lake, the stone walls were covered in blood-written accusations: "Zhou Mingxiu took three thousand silver dollars to overturn a verdict; Chen Wanguan swallowed up three saltworks; Su Xiuniang forged embroidered evidence of treason..." On the stone platform at the deepest point lay a skeleton, with Wu Mingxiu's final words arranged on its chest: "The foundations of Chen Shui Manor were paid for with my thirty-six roof beams. Every blue brick is soaked in the blood of the wronged."
