On the seventeenth day of the twelfth lunar month, a man's body was pulled from a dry well in the western market of Shangjing.
His face had been completely peeled off. Three old scars marked his left ribs.
After examining the body, the coroner looked up at the person standing ten paces away.
That person was also named Pei Zhao. He, too, had three scars on his left ribs.
Pei Zhao was an unlicensed constable in Wannian County, twenty-seven years old, with twenty-three dead people living inside him.
One was an old coroner with blood on his hands. One was a little girl who could see the final moments of the dead. One was a white-haired old man who knew the Yong Code better than the officials themselves.
Each time he called one of them, he had to forget a part of his own life.
Each time he solved a case, one personality returned to its rightful place.
Twenty-four years ago, a great fire at Chengtian Gate killed twenty-three people. Every one of them was found faceless.
The corpse was clutching a piece of paper, written in his own handwriting. It bore four words:
The twenty-fourth.
Before all twenty-four personalities were complete, he had to uncover two things:
Who had killed those twenty-three people.
And whether he himself was even human.
