During the Wanli period, the corpse of an official whose eyes had been gouged out suddenly appeared in the downtown area of the capital. On the half-page fragment of the scroll tightly clenched in his arms, "Eighteen Deadly Sins" were written clearly. Shen Yan, a member of the Jinyiwei Qianhu, was ordered to investigate the case, but found that this murder coincided with an old conspiracy involving several ethnic groups twenty years ago. The number "eighteen" contained in the fragments pointed to the eighteen unsolved cases that had been deliberately covered up since the founding of the Ming Dynasty - the drowned prince, the missing tax money, the prison edicts singing in the middle of the night...
Behind every case there is a secret that can overthrow the dynasty.
As the investigation deepened, people around Shen Yan died one after another, and all clues pointed to the depths of the Forbidden City. When he discovered a mysterious map showing the locations of eighteen skeletons in the dusty interlayer of the "Yongle Dian" in the history museum, he was shocked to realize that he had become an abandoned piece in the chess game...
Features of this book:
① Historical suspense plus original reasoning: Based on real strange cases of the Ming Dynasty, a secret room puzzle with layers of reversals is constructed.
② Dark narrative of the dynasty: Each case corresponds to the real historical events of the Ming Dynasty (Kongyin case, Hongwan case, etc.)
③ Weird symbolic imagery: historical elements such as the eighteen-link mechanism, Hongwu secret files, yin and yang bookkeeping, etc. Throughout the book
"These eighteen cases are originally a mirror that Emperor Taizu left to future generations."
——From the moment you turn the first page, you are already in the game.
