Everyone says the floods in Jiangnan are a natural disaster.
Shen Qingyuan refuses to believe it.
He heads south to tame the waters with an old abacus, manipulating mountains and rivers amid muddy torrents, only to uncover a sinister secret beneath the riverbed.
Then people begin to disappear.
Then children start singing a strange nursery rhyme:
"The celestial pivot breaks, the earth's pillars fall. The rivers' ten thousand miles of blood, all accounted for."
Deep beneath the riverbed, a copper spike bearing the mark of an old dynasty lies in silent slumber.
It is "discarded material" from twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago, someone was condemned and died for "calculating the secrets of heaven";
twenty years later, he calculates the course of that same river again.
Someone watches coldly from the sidelines, waiting for him to reach the end of his calculations.
The rivers' ten thousand miles of blood, all accounted for?
Then let them see whose blood will flow when the calculations are done.
