Ling Mo, the top forensic examiner of the apocalypse, opens her eyes to find herself a “corpse” on an ancient autopsy table. When the coroner hastily rules that she “drowned,” she sits up on the spot and overturns his conclusion with irrefutable evidence, from blunt-force trauma to the skull to the cloudiness of the corneas, pointing directly to murder. As the room erupts in shock, the sword of a disgraced general’s son is already at her throat: “If you can’t produce evidence, you’re the killer!”
Armed with rigorous modern forensic expertise, she must tread carefully in an ancient world where the separation of men and women is strictly enforced and cases are solved through conjecture alone. The deadly secrets behind the Ghost Bride case, the whispered secrets in the bones within the academy walls, the surgical trickery of the killer who wears other people’s faces, the smuggling web behind bodies floating along the Grand Canal, and the identity fraud behind a face-swapping mystery: she uses lividity as her brush and bones as her evidence to decipher the codes of death.
A-Man, a kindhearted strongman from the mortuary, runs errands for her. A prodigy from a family of coroners becomes her apprentice. Prince Jing, who oversees the Ministry of Justice, goes from disdain to devotion and becomes her strongest ally. Meanwhile, the relentless pursuit of the highly intelligent serial killer known as the “Thousand-Faced Fox” draws her into one high-stakes battle of wits after another.
Using science to dispel superstition and truth to stand against the powerful, this modern forensic examiner who wakes up as a corpse will ultimately cut through the darkness of the ancient world, becoming a torch of civilization entrusted with upholding justice and writing a thrilling legend of brilliant partners solving cases together.
