1927, Peking.
It's a new world during the day, but the old rules are still there at night.
Zhou Chong, a professor of medicine at Peking University, is known as one of the "Five Doctors" and only relies on physical evidence and experiments when handling cases. But he is also famous for his strange reputation: he runs to the autopsy room in the middle of the night and greets corpses; one sentence can make people tremble.
Fang Qian, an inconspicuous old detective in the police station, hangs around alleys, goes to teahouses, and goes to theaters, and relies on favors and connections to make a living - he doesn't like to reason, but he can always "get" clues.
Bizarre murders come one after another: secret rooms, poisonings, disappearances, burned corpses in fires, mass murders in theaters... Each case seems to be unrelated, but they always have the same flavor in some details.
Someone is using Peiping as a chessboard in the dark and using murder as a means to push the city out of control little by little.
The deeper the two men investigated, the more they discovered that the most terrifying thing was not how ruthless the murderer was - it was that the truth was like a script that had been written long ago. Every time they solved a case, it seemed like they were clearing the way for others.
The emperor is gone, but the emperor's people are still there.
The game in Beiping has just begun.
Reader comments
Interesting. Is that Wang Defa sure it was an elegant statement? Quite exciting.
There is indeed a real incident of fire in the Forbidden City in history.
Interesting. Is that Wang Defa sure it was an elegant statement? Quite exciting. There is indeed a real incident of fire in the Forbidden City in history.