Shen Zhaozhao wakes up reborn on the execution platform, accused of adultery and murder, with her life hanging by a thread. A modern forensic doctor, she uses her professional knowledge to examine the corpse in public at the execution ground, pointing out suspicious details about the fatal wound. She successfully delays the execution, beginning her quest to clear her name and overturn the verdict. But behind this miscarriage of justice lies the Marquis’s wife’s plot to cover up her husband’s sudden death and eliminate her rivals.
As she investigates, Shen Zhaozhao combines modern forensic techniques with ancient methods of examining the dead, following clues in lividity, wounds, and signs of poisoning to gradually uncover the Marquis’s household’s dark secrets. As the case deepens, she discovers that her own origins are shrouded in mystery and unexpectedly awakens “spirit-sight,” the ability to sense the final moments of the dead. With the help of Xie Jingxing, the Chief Justice of the Court of Judicial Review, Shen Zhaozhao solves the mysterious death of a maid in the Marquis’s household and the poisoning of disaster victims with tainted grain, drawing ever closer to a treasonous plot between the Marquis’s household and remnants of the previous dynasty.
Xie Jingxing seems gentle and refined, but he bears a deep-seated grudge over his mother’s death by poison and has spent ten years secretly investigating, with the Marquis’s household in his sights. From testing each other to standing side by side, the two gradually fall for one another amid repeated brushes with death. When Shen Zhaozhao uses “spirit-sight” before the Emperor to recreate the scene of her father’s murder, and Xie Jingxing presents irrefutable evidence of the Marquis’s treason, a political upheaval erupts. The Marquis’s downfall is only the beginning. An even greater conspiracy threatens the throne, and the truth about Shen Zhaozhao’s identity, Xie Jingxing’s secret mission, and the palace fire twenty years ago gradually comes to light amid the surging undercurrents.
The content inside is very graphic