She Traded Twelve Lives for a Seaside Apartment

In 2007, property prices in Emerald City were soaring, and ordinary people could spend their entire lives without being able to afford a home.

Su Zhiqing, a bank teller earning eighteen thousand a month, had a mother lying in the hospital, waiting for money to keep her alive. Before her father died, he said he wanted to close his eyes in a home overlooking the sea. But all he could see from the window was the water tank on the building opposite.

She had done the math countless times. Even living frugally, it would take three hundred years to afford a home. The only way out was a haunted house priced forty percent below market value.

She bought it.

After moving in, she discovered that more than one person had driven her into a corner.

Property speculators, price manipulators, demolition crews, loan sharks: they had turned homes into casinos and human lives into numbers, while the law always stood on the side of the rich.

Inspector Shen Jiadong of the Old Town Major Crimes Unit took over the investigation. Behind a string of seemingly unrelated deaths, he found a hidden thread. He pursued her as she evaded him. Separated by an invisible wall, they had become reflections of one another.

When the last person fell, she stood at the window of her sea-view home, gazing at the lights of Victoria Harbour.

Her mother had not lived to see this day.

And the price she paid was far greater than a house.