At the evidence center of the Binhai City Public Security Bureau, a bizarre explosion unleashed a wave of crimes spanning thirty years.
Veteran detective Li Jianguo stood before the charred evidence warehouse, facing a perfect locked-room mystery: the door had been bolted from the inside, the ventilation shaft was barely the size of a hand, and surveillance showed nobody entering or leaving before the explosion. A precision blast had destroyed seventy-six pieces of evidence from unsolved cases, yet somehow spared the crucial evidence in the “Jinxiu Garden Falling Death Case,” as if an invisible hand were pulling the strings.
As the investigation deepened, Li Jianguo realized this was no isolated incident. Over the past five years, crucial evidence in seventeen unsolved murder cases had been “accidentally” destroyed: blood samples inexplicably degraded, fingerprint lifts mysteriously damaged, surveillance footage magnetically erased... What looked like poor storage was in fact a carefully planned “evidence-erasure operation.”
Su Xiao, a newly assigned criminal investigation technical consultant, used spectral analysis to discover military-grade carborane in the blast residue. This was no material an ordinary criminal could obtain. Stranger still, every clock at the scene had stopped at 3:27, exactly the time of death in an unsolved case from thirty years ago.
When Li Jianguo discovered a black notebook filled with evidence of crimes in a secret basement room beneath the archives, the truth began to emerge. The notebook belonged to the “Five Swordsmen,” five elite officers who had once dominated the police force thirty years ago. Now, men including Deputy Director Wang Zhigang and Chief Prosecutor Liu Zhenmin had risen to positions of power.
Clipped to the notebook’s final page was a faded photograph. The words written in blood on its back struck Li Jianguo like a thunderbolt: “When the last guardian falls, the maze will open its doors to its true master...”
