The dead cannot speak, but bones can.
Reborn on the day of her rebirth, she throws down her divorce papers in front of everyone. Her ex-husband panics, his beloved first love grows frantic, and all of the capital waits for her to meet a miserable end. Instead, she crouches over a bone-inspection table, her hands covered in bone ash, while a living King of Hell from the imperial court stands behind her. He says, “Move aside. I’ll hold the lamp for her.”
In her previous life, Shen Jinghong gave everything to help the impoverished scholar Pei Zhao rise to the highest ranks of the court. The day he succeeded, he hurled a divorce letter at her, accusing her of bringing bad luck to husbands. Her family’s property was seized, her parents were imprisoned, her mother was poisoned, and she froze to death in a snowstorm, her body left unclaimed.
When she opens her eyes again, she is back on the day Pei Zhao proposes.
She tears up the marriage contract in front of everyone, then gives him three reasons that drain the color from his face. Call it breaking off the engagement? No. She is divorcing him.
The court waits for the disgraced daughter to meet a dead end, but she turns around and walks into the Dali Temple. She identifies arsenic in a skeleton, cracks a major case involving missing government silver by examining a bone seam, and makes her name as a “female coroner.” The dead cannot speak, but bones can. She makes them talk.
The deeper she digs into the cases, the closer the danger gets. A severed finger is left on her desk. The morgue’s locks are changed to trap her inside all night. A petition signed by many calls for her removal. She doesn’t care.
Until one night, the morgue’s candlelight suddenly goes out, and a hand reaches out from behind her. It is not there to kill her, but to hold the lamp for her.
Xiao Yan, the cold-faced regent and the living King of Hell whose name makes the entire court tremble, bends down to hold a lamp while she examines bones, and rides through the streets to save her when she is in danger. She thinks it is an exchange of favors, but he never tries to explain.
Until she comes across an old file: in the snowstorm of her previous life, the only person who claimed her body was him.
Clear-headed, dangerously obsessive female coroner × devoted, possessive regent | One-on-one, both devoted only to each other, happy ending | Historical mystery-solving through bone examination, court intrigue, plot twists, past and present lives
