Beiping, 1927.
By day, it is a new world. By night, the old rules still hold sway.
Zhou Chong, a medical professor at Peking University known as “the man with five doctorates,” trusts only physical evidence and experiments when solving cases. He is also famously strange: he visits the morgue in the middle of the night to greet the corpses, and can make anyone tremble with a single question.
Fang Qian is an inconspicuous veteran detective at the police station. He knows the alleyways, tea houses, and opera theaters, and makes his living through favors and connections. He doesn’t care for reasoning, but he can always “persuade” people to hand over clues.
One bizarre murder after another unfolds: locked rooms, poisonings, disappearances, charred corpses at a fire, a bloody case involving an opera troupe... Each seems unrelated, yet some detail always carries the same telltale scent.
Someone in the shadows is using Beiping as a chessboard and murder as a weapon, pushing the city toward chaos one step at a time.
The deeper the two investigate, the more they realize the most frightening thing isn’t how ruthless the killer is. It’s that the truth feels like a script written long ago, and every case they solve seems to clear the way for someone else.
The emperor is gone, but his people remain.
And the game being played in Beiping has only just begun.
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.