“The dead don't lie, but the living do.”
Night rain shrouds Chang'an. Among the corpses in a mass grave, Shen Li clutches a cold autopsy knife and crawls out of the pile. Once the daughter of a disgraced official, she is now a coroner living under an assumed name. Her mismatched eyes can read a corpse's lividity to determine when death occurred, and discern people's hearts to tell truth from lies.
“I want to cut this body open.”
Xie Linyuan, the Dali Temple's chief judge, is known as the “Living King of Hell.” He is afflicted with a strange poison and acts with ruthless severity, yet in the autopsy room he encounters this audacious woman. She publicly cuts open a corpse that appears to have died of illness, astonishing everyone and revealing just the tip of the iceberg in a string of “painted-skin” cases.
“Shen Li, are you investigating the case, or seeking revenge?”
“If revenge is a crime, then I was doomed long ago.”
From the painted-skin cases in Chang'an to the salt merchants' family massacre in Jiangnan, from the military-pay scandal on the border to the secret art of Miaojiang poisoncraft, Shen Li uses the language of corpses as her blade, exposing the rot at court one layer at a time. Xie Linyuan goes from treating her as a tool to willingly becoming the blade in her hand. Amid the whirlpool of power plays and conspiracies, the two go from using each other to standing as equals.
“Xie Linyuan, if this realm is a game, then you and I are the players moving the pieces.”
“Then let us stake the empire and wager on an age of peace and prosperity.”
When what is carried into the golden hall in a coffin is not a corpse but incontrovertible proof, and a woman in red gathers the forces of the martial world under the name of the Wind Listening Tower's master, the contest spanning both the imperial court and the martial world has only just begun.
