At her mentor's funeral, the bloodstained police badge was still warm when Wu Qian received her transfer notice: she was moving straight from a remote police station to the city's most important criminal investigation bureau. She knew better than anyone that this "unprecedented promotion" was a ticket bought with her mentor's life.
That unsolved case from five years ago had taken away the man who had been both mentor and father to her, leaving a poisonous thorn in her heart. Driven by sheer determination, she made a name for herself in her new environment and earned a place on an elite task force. She thought she could follow the clues to the truth, but while investigating a series of linked murders, a chill ran through her: the mark left by the killer was exactly like the secret symbol at her mentor's crime scene.
What unsettled her even more were the "coincidences": the mysterious informant who always appeared at crucial moments, the colleague who knew an unusual amount about the old case, even the task force's formation date, which fell suspiciously close to the anniversary of her mentor's death. The familiar faces she kept encountering in the new cases fell into place like precisely positioned chess pieces, leaving her no choice but to wonder: had the transfer and the task force been part of a carefully laid trap from the very beginning?
Was the killer luring her into a trap, or had her mentor made one final move before dying?
When the fog around the task force finally cleared, Shen Yan clutched the bloodstained badge and understood at last: the road her mentor had paved with his life was never meant to help her take revenge. He wanted her to tear open, with her own hands, the truth concealed beneath layer upon layer of traps for three or five years, a truth that had failed even to protect a life.
