In the winter of the tenth year of Zhaoming, a single fire burned through the mask of a golden age.
Chen Yong, a director in the Ministry of Works, is found dead in his home late at night, with a shocking character carved into his chest: “Ash.” Shen Qingheng, a judicial investigator from the Ministry of Justice, is ordered to investigate. But she soon discovers that she is lifting the lid on a decade-old palace massacre: the “Ashen Night Incident.”
The clues lead to the ghost market in the western district, secret patterns from the previous dynasty, and the ruins of Qinghui Hall, where half the imperial city once burned. Every victim also clutches a fragment marked with the same dark-gold pattern.
Meanwhile, a “ghost” who should have died in that fire ten years ago quietly returns. Yan Wugou, once the son of the Grand Tutor, is now the “Ash” who moves through the darkness. He wields the forbidden art of Ash: each time he uses it, he permanently loses a memory or an emotion. He has returned for only two reasons: to kill everyone who set the fire back then, and to find the entrance to the underground palace beneath Qinghui Hall, where everything was taken from him.
Shen Qingheng follows the light of the law; Yan Wugou wields the fire of vengeance. They should have been a player and a pawn, a judicial officer and a criminal. But the hand that pushed her away in the fire ten years ago, and the bloodstained character “Ash” on the case file today, have bound their fates together.
Beneath the underground palace lies no treasure from the previous dynasty, but a forbidden power capable of overthrowing the empire, along with the cruel truth of the “Human Soul Key.” And behind it all, the Grand Preceptor Gongyi Yan is smiling as he sets an even greater game in motion. He treats the world as his board and all living beings as his pieces. What he wants has never been merely to bury the past.
When the key enters the lock, will it open the door to the truth, or the road to hell?
