In the 1990s, undercurrents stirred in Jiangcheng, and strange cases kept cropping up. Professor Chen Jingyuan vanished under mysterious circumstances, the dismemberment case at Jinling University was riddled with bizarre clues, and the Zheng father and son disappeared without a trace. One mysterious missing-person case after another followed. The cases seemed scattered, unrelated, and utterly unconnected, yet time buried them all as unsolved cold cases, hidden in the sealed files of the old city.
More than thirty years passed. At last, the old cases were reopened. Investigators crossed provincial and city borders to follow leads, searched the old city's narrow alleys, and dug into the hidden connections and buried past that the times had concealed. Step by step, through deduction and painstaking investigation, they pieced together strange cases that had been separated for decades.
A hidden web of crime spanning decades beneath the everyday city slowly took shape. The brutal truth buried by time emerged through layer after layer of fog, ready at last to break through the darkness and be exposed to the world. (Written from a criminal investigation perspective.)
