Dunhuang, twenty-five years of the Republic of China.
Detective Lu Chen has a shady ability: when his hands touch the flesh of a dead person, he can see what the deceased saw in the last three seconds before he died.
The price is that he will feel pain no matter how the deceased died.
A female corpse was found outside the grotto, hanging upside down as if flying into the sky, with lapis lazuli blood seeping from her back. Lu Chen touched the corpse and looked back, and saw a pair of eyes - slender, cold, like the "inhumans" written in the Buddhist scriptures - the same pair as the serial killer who shot him six years ago.
During the investigation, he dug out old files from the 19th year of the Republic of China. The person who wrote the file was Lin Mo, a lecturer at Yenching University who disappeared mysteriously while investigating a case in Dunhuang. There is only one line on the last page of the file:
"The killer will come back with a child."
What's even more weird is that there is a note in the file, and the date is today.
Lu Chen followed the clues and found Su Mi, a young woman who has been restoring murals for generations. There is a birthmark on her back, shaped like a map, pointing to a non-existent cave in the northern part of the Mogao Grottoes. The birthmark was tattooed with cinnabar, a secret that had been passed down for three hundred years.
They joined forces and discovered that the murderer was Gao Yuan, a folk scholar who had lived for an unknown number of years and replaced his body with a living human heart every twenty years. He arranged the murder scene into a picture of six reincarnations, fed the murals with paint mixed with human blood, and waited for the day when the murals would swallow reality.
At the end of the chase, Gao Yuan said something to Lu Chen:
"I am your father. Your abilities are the sacrifices I planted in your bones since childhood."
Lu Chen cut off his right arm, cut off the tattoo, and cut off the curse passed down in his blood. Su Mi walked into the mural, sealed himself into the wall, and became the new master of the corpse forest...
Engaging story.