Beneath the glittering surface, strange cases abound. Amid the bustle of everyday life, murderous plots lurk.
Lin'an, in the twelfth year of the Shaoxing era.
Xuan Mo, once a scribe at the Privy Council, angered the powerful and was banished by official decree to the bustling Southern Song capital. There he became a low-ranking Assistant Judicial Commissioner, tasked with handling old cases no one wanted to touch and new crimes shrouded in mystery. The grand policy papers of the Privy Council were replaced by dusty homicide files in the local court, and the brush he had once used to write about the affairs of the realm now traced the fine line between life and death.
He thought he would be buried in paperwork until the end of his days.
Until a fragrant morning dawned.
A doctorate from the Imperial College was found dead at a book-printing workshop, and all that remained beside the body was a strange, lingering scent. The mystery of a supposedly cursed fragment of the Dream Pool Essays had also resurfaced: it had vanished. From subtle differences in the formula of the ink used for the woodblocks, Xuan Mo glimpsed the first light of dawn. And it was this case that brought him together with two people who should never have crossed paths...
