On the night Shen Jinhuan, a disgraced consort confined to the Cold Palace, drank poisoned wine, a heaven-scorching blaze engulfed the imperial palace. When she opened her eyes again, she had become a female coroner dissecting corpses in a mass grave to prove the Dao. A dissection knife in her left hand, a pulse-sealing needle hidden in her right, she was dragged back into the inner palace by the waist by the tyrant Xiao Chengyuan. The emperor who had once sentenced her to death by white silk now pressed close to her night after night as she examined corpses, searching the throat bones of every body for a golden thread embroidered with Sanskrit.
“Beloved consort, why do your wounds always heal after you’ve touched the dead?”
Xiao Chengyuan’s bloodstained fingertips traced the red lotus birthmark on her neck. Beneath the imperial bed lay an ice coffin holding her body from her past life, still unburied. Meanwhile, the imperial physician Xie Yunshen arrived beneath the moon with his medicine chest. Behind his gentle exterior lurked an obsessive madness. “A Jin, you carved out my heart to save him. Did you know the tomb we were to share has been gathering dust for ten years?”
A record of autopsies in the inner palace, where white bones reveal a shocking conspiracy.
The ice-coffin plot involving a favored consort who was a stand-in, the mystery surrounding the switched identities of twin princes, and a string of bloody cases involving imperial decrees hidden in throat bones all point to the truth behind Shen Jinhuan’s bizarre strangulation in her past life. When Xiao Chengyuan shatters his kneecaps kneeling for her, and Xie Yunshen burns the Medicine King Valley to the ground for her sake, she carves a bloodstained silver bell from the tyrant’s heart. It is the very instrument of death that once hung from a beam in the Cold Palace above her!
The red lotus flames of karmic retribution will burn away the sins of both lifetimes. This time, she will use her dissection knife to cut open the filthiest secrets of imperial power.
“Your Majesty, do you know what makes the perfect stand-in...” Shen Jinhuan’s knife tip pierced the emperor’s chest, and she smiled, radiant as blood. “Even your empire will serve as my coffin.”
