Death Cards: The Death Playing Cards

[Wild imagination, crime, and a story that breaks the mold]

On a stormy night, every electronic screen in Binhai New City is suddenly stained red with blood.

A Jack of Hearts appears mysteriously beside a corpse. The mark of a knight’s sword matches exactly with evidence from a twelve-year-old international money-laundering case. Crime profiler Yao Jingyan is forced into the game, only to find traces of the sapphire his father wore before he disappeared beneath the dead man’s fingernails. That “fallen hero” was the first dealer for the playing-card organization.

Now the entire city has become a giant game table, with countdowns suspended on the outside walls of every building:

◆ A financial oligarch melts into blood in a gold-plated bathtub, while a Club Queen pattern crawls across the stock exchange dome.

◆ Fifty-two surveillance screens light up inside an underwater shipwreck’s secret chamber. Every screen shows the nightmare of his childhood safe.

◆ When his father’s signed “Parent-Child Mortgage Agreement” appears in a dark-web livestream, the quantum-key silver chain around his wrist suddenly grows hot. It turns out to be a virus program written by his mother using her own brain cells.

“Congratulations on unlocking the apocalypse bonus.” Joker’s mask cracks, revealing a holographic image of Yao Jingyan as an infant. “Choose: let the whole city perish with you, or admit that you’re the original wild card?”