Lead White Bones

A new rouge shop opened in Chang'an East City called "Zhu Yan Gai". Its lipstick is bright and not vulgar, and it will not fade for three days after it is applied on the lips. All the ladies in the city are rushing to buy it. The sale is limited to 20 boxes a day, and there are long queues before dawn. No one knows who the owner is. No one knew that under the stone slab of the well in the backyard, there was a carefully processed female corpse sealed - the skin was corroded and peeled off alive, the joints were precisely disassembled, and layers of lime and spices were sealed. Pei Yanzhi, the minister of Dali Temple, took over the case and found that the only breakthrough was a woman who was despised by the whole city. Her name is Shen Shiyue, the daughter of the former judge of the Taiyuan Hospital and now a private widower. Neighbors said that she killed her father and was unlucky and unclean, so they took a detour when they saw her. She doesn't care. She only cares about one thing: three years ago, her father was falsely accused of "disfiguring his concubine with drugs" and was demoted from Chang'an. He then died suddenly and mysteriously. There was a piece of blackened silver hidden in the ashes returned from the altar. Zhu Yan changed the female corpse at the bottom of the well using the same poison and the same method as the case of Concubine Shu. She does the autopsy, he investigates the case. There was no flash of inspiration, no miracle from heaven. There is only a bone ruler, a bottle of potion, a silver needle, and two pairs of eyes that don't believe in coincidences. The identity of the deceased was inferred from tooth wear, the order of the cremation was restored from the ashes, and a secret that spanned three years was dug out from the flashing names in the account book - someone used living people to test the secret recipe for beauty, and used the bones of dead people to bake pigments, but no one had ever reported the case on behalf of the missing women. When the seventh ashes appeared in the brick kiln, Shen Shiyue finally understood: what her father opened back then was not a box of medicine, but...