Thirteen years ago, the six-year-old daughter of the Ye family "died" in a murder case. Ten years later, a blind girl with an unusual sense of smell returned to the capital and entered the Dali Temple as a priest - her name was Ye Qiu.
She can distinguish between good and evil in a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood. Two drops of oil and a wisp of body odor can identify the real culprit. The cold cases she handled never lasted more than three days. Her colleagues only regarded her as a gifted detective whom no one knew: she recognized the face of every murderer, but had to pretend that she had never seen them before.
Starting from the mysterious and sudden death of the prefect Wang Yuan, twelve seemingly unrelated murders have surfaced one after another. Ye Qiu uses scent as a blade to cut through the layers of disguise. Every time he solves a case, he takes a step closer to the people on the list. But there is always the same sweetness lingering between the cases - someone is using her hand to erase the insiders one by one.
Chu Yan, the young minister of Dali Temple, went from testing to working together, from secretly tracking down to surrendering his life. The secret he had guarded for thirteen years was finally revealed: he had always believed that the young daughter of the Shen family was still alive. And when the true identity of He Lanzhen, the minister of Dali Temple, was exposed, Ye Qiu discovered that the list her father had left with his life pointed to the name that she had never dared to touch.
When her sense of smell was traced back to the end of her memory, the real murder was completed on a rainy night when she was six years old. And she came back alive, not to solve the case, but to let everyone see clearly who was the person who shouldn't be alive back then.
