When forensic pathologist Lin Du cuts open the first corpse in a supernatural case, which is the real fig leaf hiding the truth: science or taboo?
Forensic pathologist Lin Du believes in only one thing: the dead are the most honest witnesses. Y-shaped incisions, diatom tests, DNA matching: with a scalpel and microscope, he makes the dead “speak.” That is, until a long hair that did not belong to the deceased is found in the stomach of a drowned man; until a third signature, labeled “contracting party,” appears on a land deed from the Republic of China era; until surveillance footage at a funeral home captures the impossible: a shadowy figure pushing open compartment No. 7 at two in the morning and speaking to the corpse inside.
“That’s my body.”
Who can solve the cases science cannot explain?
A yellowed ledger called the “Strange Records” leads him to Shen Molan, a folklore scholar who calls herself a “Recorder of the Strange.” She tells him that every unsolved mystery, forgotten taboo, and broken contract in the world becomes a “book slip” in a supernatural library called the Library of the Realm of the Dead. Whenever humanity breaks a taboo, the book slips turn a page, and horror steps out of legend into reality.
When forensic medicine encounters the laws of the Realm of the Dead, who can deliver the final verdict?
This is a manhunt spanning both the living and the dead. Lin Du cuts ever deeper with his scalpel, moving from subcutaneous tissue into the chains of cause and effect. Shen Molan’s Strange Records grow thicker with every page, revealing how folk taboos herald the start of a war between two worlds. Police Captain Zhou Dachuan’s bullets cannot pierce spirits. Lian Jie, head of the forensic evidence division, is summoned to court in the Realm of the Dead for being “too scientific.” And with each turn of the walnuts in funeral home night watchman Uncle Lao Zhuang’s hand, another piece of the truth rises to the surface.
So what is the truth? Let’s find out together!
