Three Years After Being Cast Out of the Marquis's Household, the Entire Capital Awaits My Autopsy

Pei Zhaotang was once the brightest jewel in the Marquis’s household. Skilled in music, chess, calligraphy, and painting, she was said to be blessed with good fortune. Then the Marquis’s true-blood daughter was found, and overnight Pei Zhaotang went from treasured child to a sinner accused of stealing another’s place. Her father said nothing, her mother looked on coldly, and her brothers despised her. Even the heir she had been promised to turned around and protected the true heiress. Pei Zhaotang was sent to tend the lamps at the imperial mausoleum, and everyone thought she would quietly go out like an old lamp. But she survived those three years. She learned autopsies, poison identification, scent recognition, and bone analysis from an old palace woman, and obtained half of a secret manual left behind by her late mother, Records of Bone Illumination. When a string of cases known as “The Deaths of Brides in Red” erupted in the capital, each victim dying mysteriously on the eve of her wedding with no external injuries, the Marquis’s household was dragged into the affair. To silence public opinion, the family had no choice but to bring Pei Zhaotang back to the capital. The first thing she did upon stepping back into the Marquis’s gates was not reclaim her place in the family. Instead, she opened a coffin and performed an autopsy before everyone’s eyes. That examination uncovered a series of marriage cases involving noblewomen, decades-old secrets buried within the Marquis’s household, proof that her mother had not died of illness, and the truth that the year the true heiress was found, another girl had died young in the capital. Everyone thought she had returned to seek justice. Only she knew she had never wanted to “come home.” She meant to dismantle this predatory household and the chain of power behind it, layer by layer, until the truth came to light. And through all the upheaval, the only person who remained by her side was Xie Jibai, a Vice Minister of the Court of Judicial Review. Cold and unfeeling, he cared only about evidence, yet when he first saw her perform an autopsy, he said: “Miss Pei, you didn’t come back to seek justice. You came back to put them on trial.”