In the autumn of the third year of the Jinglong era, undercurrents swirled through Chang’an. Fourteen-year-old Pei Xijun was still a sheltered young lady. Though she was the daughter of Pei Jian, Vice Minister of Personnel, she had an extraordinary eye for color and shape, allowing her to spot details others overlooked and glimpse the hidden corners of the human heart.
A “faceless corpse case” shattered the peace of the Pei household. All seven members of the Chen family, a silk merchant’s household in the Western Market, had died suddenly, their facial skin completely removed. The only thing left at the scene was a strange painting of peonies. As the mayor of Jingzhao was at a loss, Xijun happened to discover hidden symbols in the painting: coded records of Chang’an’s underground banks. Keeping her actions secret from her father, she claimed she was going to paint a mural in a Buddhist hall and slipped into temples near the crime scene. From the conversations of worshippers, she pieced together a shocking web connecting the court and the martial world.
As the investigation deepened, Xijun encountered three mysterious forces: an underground river gang marked by “peony tattoos,” a fallen noble family pursuing the secret of immortality, and a sinister organization calling itself the “Bone Pickers.” Relying on her keen powers of observation, she traced indigo dye found under the corpse’s fingernails to a Persian caravan, uncovered a junior official in the Ministry of Revenue through a watermark in a ledger, and used a children’s rhyme to solve an old imperial examination fraud case from ten years earlier.
When all the clues pointed to an enemy of her father, Pei Jian, Xijun realized she had long been a pawn on the board. At last, she set a trap to draw out the real culprit: someone close to her whom she had never suspected. She uncovered the secret struggle for imperial power concealed behind the ritual of “face stripping.” Once the case was settled, her father was transferred to Luoyang, and Xijun compiled all the case files into the Chang’an Map of Strange Traces and locked it away. She had no idea that five years later, when Lu Lingfeng, Su Wuming, and the others arrived in Chang’an, this map would hold the key to unraveling an even greater mystery…
