The rain in Chang'an always smells of blood.
The three claw marks on the back of the third-rank minister's heart are deep enough to show the bone, and the gold powder in the fingernails glows dimly under the candlelight - this is the first case Su Wuxue, the judge of Dali Temple, has received, but he does not know that this is just the first wedge to pry open the fog of Wu Zhou.
With the autopsy token given by the late emperor himself, he walked through the strange unit cases:
Under the lotus crown with the word "Luo" hidden behind the neck, half of the face of an old man from the East Palace was melted away by poisonous glass;
The golden lotus of the Persian Hu Shang contained the fragmentary pages of the late emperor's edict that could overturn the government;
Under the grass in front of the headless monument in Beimang Mountain, every grass root is entangled with the hair of the innocent soul from ten years ago.
Su Wuxue is not afraid of ghosts, but what she is afraid of is that people's hearts are crueler than ghosts.
What he wanted to examine was never the corpse, but the truth hidden in the files, the innocent souls buried under the bluestone, and the bit of blood belonging to Chang'an that refused to be extinguished under Wu Zetian's iron fist.
"One case, one bone, one study, one mind."
When the last piece of the puzzle fell into place, he understood: the end of all mysteries is the same gamble on the soul of the country. And his knife is not only meant to kill the murderer, but also to cut through the human skin wrapped in power.
