In the Yuanhe era of the Tang dynasty, on a snowy night in Chang’an, blood tears streamed from the broken face of a thousand-year-old Buddha at Tongtuo Temple. Shen Yan, a young assistant minister of the Dali Court, wore plain robes as pale as moonlight, with ink-dark frost in his eyes. He was skilled at using the “Ink-Ice” technique to make impressions of traces left on bones, and could read a person’s innermost thoughts from their brushstrokes.
The Buddha’s face wept blood, throwing the court and common folk into an uproar. Ordered by the emperor to investigate, Shen Yan discovered the tears were brine mixed with the rouge of a foreign woman. Following the trail to a Zoroastrian shrine in the Western Market, he unearthed the body of a tongueless woman beneath a Persian carpet. A silver coin was lodged in her throat bone. It bore the era name “Tianshou” and dated back to the Wu Zhou dynasty.
Examining the Buddha’s severed neck, he found fine cuts hidden in the grain of the wood, clearly made by a “hundred-refined steel” blade, a weapon unavailable to ordinary people. Shen Yan visited the Directorate of Military Equipment at night and learned that the only such blade had once been gifted to Li Heng, former military governor of Shuofang. Li Heng had died in battle three years earlier, and his residence had since become an overgrown ruin.
The plum tree in the Li residence had long since withered, yet a fresh red ribbon hung from one of its branches. When Shen Yan broke off a twig, he caught a faint fragrance and identified it as “Soul-Returning Incense,” which only Uyghur shamans knew how to make. He traveled far to Uyghur territory, where he encountered the shaman woman A Lan on a snowy plain. She divined with her life and foretold: “When the blood moon shines over Chang’an and the Buddha’s face weeps again, its former master will return.”
Back in the capital, Shen Yan discovered that Li Heng’s son, Li Yi, was now a palace guard secretly forging weapons. He planned to use the Buddha case to provoke the emperor into killing monks and avenge his father. Shen Yan set another trap at Tongtuo Temple, using Ink-Ice to take an impression of Li Yi’s palm and compare it with the blade marks on the Buddha’s face. They matched exactly.
Li Yi was captured, but laughed as he said, “The Buddha’s blood tears are really an omen that the emperor will murder his father. You uphold the law, Shen Yan, but dare you put the emperor on trial?” Shen Yan fell silent, sheathed his blade, and sealed Li Yi’s testimony in a bronze box. He sank it into the ancient well at the Dali Court and covered it with three stone weights.
The next day, the emperor issued an edict.
I've read a few chapters, it's a rare and good book. It's similar to Detective Dee and the Strange Stories of the Tang Dynasty, which makes people want to put it down, but there is no live audio. I don't like to read text, I like to listen to audio. When will Tomato release the audio?