When Qin Jian opened his eyes, he had become a junior law clerk in Xianyang’s southern market. A bamboo slip inscribed with “autopsy report” lay before him, and a half-hard millet cake was tucked into his robes. There was an unidentified corpse in the burial ground outside the city, and the county magistrate ordered him to close the case within three days. Drawing on his memories of modern forensic textbooks, he searched for clues between the statutes of Qin law and the wounds on the corpse. When the writing on the bamboo slip matched the knife marks on the body, he realized the murder involved far more than a single corpse.
