Terror on the mountain road: the mystery in the painting
In the midsummer of northern Anhui Province, Wang Heidan, a teacher at the Provincial Academy of Fine Arts, was on his way back to his hometown. On the bank of the Song River, he ran into fellow villager Wang Peng and was beaten by a strong man. The cause was a misunderstanding about "peeping in the bath." When the beaten Wang Peng knelt down and begged for mercy, Wang Heidan recognized the bruised face - it was the boy next door from seven years ago. The girl who stopped the attacker, Zhou Qian, turned out to be a beauty from the county town whom Wang Heidan had met in his early years. Her disheveled appearance and the pine forest by the river cast a strange shadow on this encounter.
Before the storm was over, Zhou Qian revealed that an ancient painting at home had been blackmailed anonymously. Behind the ransom of half a million yuan was the secret message of the late Ming connoisseur "Old Man Shi Yin" hidden in the painting. Wang Heidan gleaned clues from the holes in the scroll and the crescent-shaped scabs, and discovered that Wang Peng had sneaked into Zhou's house to steal paintings, and the mastermind behind the scenes was the ruffian Qiangzi who forced Wang Peng to pay gambling debts. In order to solve the mystery, the three people planned to recapture the ancient paintings overnight, but they were surrounded by Qiangzi's men in the Zhou family's study. Wang Heidan broke out of the encirclement with injuries, and accidentally took out a secret letter recording "The Blue Stone of Hanshan Temple in Suzhou" from the scroll.
After chasing the murderer for thousands of miles to Hanshan Temple, Wang Heidan and Wang Peng found a stone tablet engraved with the crescent mark deep in the Forest of Steles. The bluestone they dug out actually led to the killer sent by Qiangzi. In the life-and-death pursuit, the tower-shaped pattern on the bluestone is looming, and the secret of the old man Shi Yin has not yet been revealed. Wang Heidan has already taken the bluestone on his way home, but he does not know that the strongman's dragnet is being cast towards the northern Anhui county. Hidden in the sound of the waves of the Song River are the mysteries of ancient paintings, the confessions of gamblers, and the greed of local gangsters. A treasure mystery spanning ancient and modern times is setting off layers of chaos between the countryside and the temple, with lives at stake.
