In the twenty-sixth year of Guangxu's reign, in Tianjin Wei at the end of the Gengzi summer, a floating corpse in foreign clothes on the Haihe River broke the dullness of the troubled times. There were strangulation marks on the neck of the deceased, and his identity was a mystery. Half of the body was floating in the British Concession, and the other half was in the Qing Dynasty, like a scar tearing apart the times.
Tianjin County Yamen Master Gu Yanqing, as a scholar, withstood the arrogance of foreigners and the officialdom's prevarication, determined to find out the truth. As the investigation deepens, the identity of the deceased Jiang Yicheng gradually becomes clear - he is both an "Er Maozi" obsessed with Western learning and a loner who secretly protects the national treasure. A red-painted wooden box implicated the romantic girl Su Meixian and the mysterious German businessman Richter, and revealed the tip of the iceberg of transnational cultural relic smuggling.
When the secret of "ten" in blood surfaced, Gu Yanqing realized that this was not only a murder case, but also a microcosm of the collision of old and new and the turmoil of family and country. Caught between foreign guns and old laws, he must carve a path in the darkness to bring justice to the dead and find a glimmer of light in troubled times. And the treasure map and bronze knight in that box have long been destined to drag everyone into a deeper whirlpool...
