The Strange Cases of Chang'an: The Commander’s Atheism

In the flourishing Kaiyuan era, music and revelry still filled Chang’an’s night banquets, but ghosts and monsters had already slipped quietly into the city. A ghost bride claimed lives in her red wedding robes, a painted-skin demon peeled off faces in the night, and the Yellow Springs Inn devoured souls and bones. Every bloody case was cloaked in the guise of the supernatural, throwing the court and the public into turmoil. Yet Pei Xuan, the chief of the Bureau of Unusual Affairs who handled investigations into bizarre cases, was the least superstitious man in the glorious imperial capital.

As a child, he had survived a massacre that was dismissed as the work of “evil spirits.” Now, with nothing but a mortal body, he raises a torch to face the darkness. The survival wisdom of people from every walk of life, his knack for reading people, and a blade-sharp logic bordering on obsession are his weapons for cutting through the fog. When he picks up a thread at a crime scene that doesn’t belong to the victim, and unravels a tightly woven conspiracy hidden in a prophecy, the mysterious woman who has always burned incense and pored over documents in the depths of the Quiet Night Pavilion, Su Yinwan, finally pushes half a volume of forbidden arts before him. “Does Lord Pei know that even ghosts must follow rules when they kill?”

Beneath the prosperous age, a vast web woven with forbidden arts to alter the nation’s destiny is closing around them. The Bureau of Unusual Affairs chief has no supernatural powers or magic, only his wits as a blade. He cuts through every illusion of the “impossible” and carves a path to survival for the Great Tang in a game of chess between the living and the dead.

There are no ghosts here, only human hearts more terrifying than ghosts.