In Northern Song Bianjing, the Bian River flows through the city. The pleasure quarters hide romance, but also ancient grudges and uncanny mysteries that have endured for a thousand years.
A bronze mirror by the Bian River can snatch souls. Pearls in the government treasury transform into merfolk who weep blood. The abandoned old mansion echoes with the ghosts of Warring States retainers. A missing painter is trapped inside a fragment of Along the River During the Qingming Festival… Twelve supernatural cases unfold one after another. The dead meet unnatural ends, the living go mad, and the entire city is gripped by fear.
A young coroner uses The Washing Away of Wrongs to examine bones and clear the wrongly accused. He bears the weight of his family’s massacre, and his father’s notes conceal secrets tied to the supernatural cases. A down-on-his-luck scholar may seem too weak to swat a chicken, but he is descended from the spirit guardians who protect Bianjing. He can whisper with spirits and discern the mysteries of yin and yang.
Bound together by the curse of the bronze mirror, one examines corpses and hunts killers while the other communes with spirits and follows their traces. They pursue the truth step by step through the underground ancient city beneath the “layered city.” Gradually, they discover that a fragment of a bronze talisman lies behind every supernatural case, and that every wail of a vengeful spirit conceals a shocking conspiracy by the surviving descendants of a former dynasty.
The twelve talismans can open the underground city. The spirit guardians’ bloodline is the key to sacrificing to evil spirits, and his family was among those sacrificed for exposing the ritual conspiracy all those years ago.
When the twelve cases converge and the evil spirits in the underground city are about to awaken, will the two young men become Bianjing’s night watchmen, or pawns in a plot to overthrow the Song dynasty?
An ancient capital, a game of life and death. Pierce the veil of monsters to see the human heart. Beneath the white bones, only the truth endures.
