Republican-Era Paranormal Detective: The Bloodstained Talisman

In 1937, strange events plagued Shanghai. A wealthy French Concession merchant died overnight in a locked room, his corpse marked with a bizarre cinnabar seal. One eyeless corpse after another drifted out of the Huangpu River, each with the words “Underworld Constable” carved into the soles of its feet. An old Daoist priest at the City God Temple was struck dead by lightning in front of a crowd, and a bronze ghost bell was found buried in the ashes... Shen Yanzhi, a dashing, roguish detective who had returned from studying abroad, was specially hired by the police to investigate a bizarre case in which an entire household had been slaughtered. He bore the ancestral gift of “yin-yang eyes,” allowing him to see through the divide between the living and the dead, but a childhood trauma had taught him to keep the ability hidden. During the investigation, he discovered that all the victims were connected to a “living sacrifice” from ten years earlier. Back then, the Jiangnan tycoon Gu family had used the blood of a hundred children to forge a Soul-Suppressing Cauldron in their quest for immortality. The ritual triggered a backlash from a blood curse that wiped out the entire family, leaving only a mysterious figure in a bronze mask to escape. As Shen Yanzhi dug deeper, he was repeatedly obstructed by “ghosts.” A female ghost in a qipao sang a deathly nursery rhyme late at night, an army of paper figures chased him through the alleys, and a “Painted Skin Master” with illusion magic even disguised himself as someone close to Shen. At a crucial moment, the alluring newspaper reporter Su Manli became embroiled in the case. She held a key clue to the Gu family massacre, yet was always walking the edge of danger. Meanwhile, the seemingly honest old hand at the police station, Li Dadan, was actually one of the survivors from that year, harboring a secret desire for revenge.