An ancient city that sank a thousand years ago, a rooster's crow that should never have sounded, a skeleton clutching a bronze token...
Chen, a retired county gazetteer editor, doesn't believe in "divine punishment." He believes only in historical fact. He ventures into Jimingwa in Linyi at night, the ruins of the "Fallen City," said to have sunk overnight because its people grew extravagant and forgot their roots. He wants only to uncover the truth behind the local legend.
But when a third rooster's crow, rasping like a rusty bell, rises from underground, and dark red, bloody fluid seeps through the cracks in the blue bricks, he realizes that so-called "divine punishment" is just a lie the living tell one another. The true taboo is a warning written in bones by the dead.
On the night the prophecies of a flowering carrying pole and a bleeding stone lion come true, he touches the bronze token engraved with the words "The Lu clan has not returned." From that moment on, he becomes part of the legend of Jiming City.
Rooted in a thousand years of oral tradition from the land of northern Shandong, and sharpened by modern suspense, Jiming at Midnight takes you into Linyi's deepest night. There are no ghosts or gods there, only forgotten kindness and buried evil, lying silently underground and waiting for the next person to hear a rooster crow.
