Novel Description (350 words)
One day, elite provincial forensic examiner Shen Yuan wakes up as the lowest-ranking coroner’s apprentice in the Six Gates Bureau. In a world where martial arts and inner energy reign supreme and the rules of the martial world are paramount, his scalpel and scientific thinking seem completely out of place.
Barely settled in, he is assigned the unsolved case of a body found floating in a river. The male victim has been declared an accidental drowning, but a fish bone is lodged in his mouth, and his fist is clenched around three copper coins arranged in a triangle. His colleagues dismiss it as an “accident,” but Shen Yuan sees a carefully disguised murder. With precise analysis of livor mortis and muscle spasms, he boldly overturns the conclusion that the killing was done with inner energy. He even finds a faint trace of cinnabar in the gap between two coins.
From then on, carrying a specially made glass lantern, he ventures into the turbulent martial world. Stone dust in a blue-stone alley, an alchemy furnace at the Xuandu Temple, undercurrents at a dock controlled by the Salt Transport Gang ... One by one, he strips away the disguises from mysteries that seem to have been created by “martial arts.” With the burly, fearless constable Zhao Tieying as his partner, and the clever, spirited Su Yunshang, whose past is shrouded in mystery, as his new acquaintance, Shen Yuan wields modern criminal investigation like a sword to cut through layers of fog.
But when the clues finally point to a sinister bronze cauldron that uses young boys and girls as “medicinal ingredients,” and the mastermind known by the codename “Iron Abacus,” Shen Yuan realizes that he is facing more than vendettas in the martial world. It is a shocking conspiracy that could overturn the imperial court. Science and the occult, the law and the rules of the martial world, collide with a crash. When martial arts cannot reach the truth, only logic can shatter every illusion!
