During the Xihe period of the Song Dynasty, Pingjiang County in the south of the Yangtze River.
Shen Moyan, a lecturer at the academy, appears to be a dull scholar who teaches classics, but in his heart he is a logician who uses "investigation of things" to solve all puzzles. He does not believe in ghosts and gods, only in observable and verifiable principles.
However, strange cases in Pingjiang happened one after another——
Paper figures wander by themselves in the middle of the night, and there must be paper figures written in blood next to the deceased;
Scholars died suddenly one after another, and inkstones grinded out blood-like ink;
A faceless floating corpse floated from the river, with copper coins in its mouth that shouldn't be there...
Every case is cloaked in folklore, and horrifying nursery rhymes circulate in every street. The people said it was a ghost that was killing people, but Shen Moyan said: "There are only people in the world who pretend to be gods and ghosts."
Joining him in tracing the truth are Gu Xichao, the rebellious official eldest daughter, Pei Jiu, a former disciple of the Moliu Society who has a secret, Zhao Sanniang, a fast-talking widower, and Liu Shouzhuo, an old Jianghu man full of folk taboos.
What they don't know is that behind all the strange cases, a mysterious organization called "Moliu Society" is slowly closing its net. What Shen Moyan has to do is to find the only way out in the maze of people's hearts and deceptions——
The most terrifying thing in the world is not ghosts, but human hearts.
"Records of Pingjiang Secret Cases": Ten volumes of independent cases, with a hidden thread running through them. Slow heat, true character, folk clothing, artificial core.
