In the twenty-sixth year of the Republic of China, antique restorer Shen Yanqiu took over a jade-inlaid and red lacquer box in Beiping Liulichang. Half of a blood-stained picture of a lady was hidden in a hidden compartment at the bottom of the box. That night, the client mysteriously drowned in a dry well at his home. The bottom of the well was covered with broken pieces of Hetian jade of the same style in the box.
In order to solve the mystery, she was forced to cooperate with Su Manqing, a forensic doctor who had returned from studying abroad. One can read stories from the coating of artifacts, and the other can find the truth in the patterns on corpses. When they followed the clues of the ladies' pictures, they discovered the secret of the death of Concubine Zhen during the Guangxu period, as well as the "Yin Yang Pawn Shop" hidden under the floor tiles of the Forbidden City - where the pawns were not gold and silver, but the memories of living people.
As seven pawns died suddenly one after another, antiques from different dynasties were placed next to each corpse: the hoof of a Tang Sancai horse with severed fingers, a Song porcelain bowl containing gouged out eyeballs, a Ming huanghuali box with hair in a locked scalp... Shen Yanqiu discovered that the cinnabar mole on the tiger's mouth of his left hand was exactly the same as the birthmark of the concubine in the painting of a lady.
When the pawn shop owner reappears with a secret message from a hundred years ago, the two female detectives are shocked: what they are tracking is never the murderer, but a cursed reincarnation that spans three generations.
