"Midnight Cry in an Ancient House"
Summary of the novel
During the Daqi Dynasty, the Su family of Kyoto's "Linglong Pavilion" was famous for its restoration of ancient artifacts and ingenious mechanisms. It was especially good at cracking the lost "Luban Lock". However, all the members of the family were executed overnight for "liaison with foreign enemies." Only the young Su Weiwan was rescued by a loyal servant and hid in the market under the pseudonym "Wan Niang".
Seven years later, strange things happened frequently in the old residence of the Gu family, a wealthy businessman in Kyoto: puppets were heard crying late at night, antiques in the warehouse moved on their own, and servants even claimed to have seen the late old lady sitting in the courtyard doing embroidery. The Gu family invited Taoist priests to no avail, and finally found Wan Niang, who was famous for "unraveling strange locks and solving conspiracies". Wan Niang stepped into the Gu family's old house and found that every carved beam and painted building here was hidden with exquisite mechanisms, and the source of the strange things pointed to a "Hundred Son Puppet" that was said to have been purchased from the Su family's old house.
During the investigation, Wan Niang bumped into Lu Jingyuan, the commander of the Jinyi Guards who was ordered to investigate the "remnants of the Su family". Lu Jingyuan has an imperial mandate, but he still has doubts about the institutional layout of the Gu family's old house and the old cases of the Su family. The two tested each other and were forced to cooperate: cracking the red sandalwood cabinet that can "kill people" (the cabinet contains a mechanism that shoots poisonous needles when triggered), deciphering the "blood silk silk" embroidered with cipher text (using special dye to reveal words in the dark), tracking the "voice puppet" that can imitate human voices...
As the secrets hidden in the utensils were revealed one by one, Wan Niang discovered that the Gu family
