When I was twenty, I failed the college entrance exam. Grandpa tossed me a brass key and told me to take over a shop in the city called the Pavilion of Celestial Secrets. The key was cold enough to sting my hand, the dust in the shop made me sneeze, and every so often the tip of a cloth shoe would peek out from behind the curtain, only to retreat again.
Grandpa had raised me on The Book of Ma Yi's Physiognomy, so I was more at home reading faces than reading words. In my first three days running the shop, a woman in a red dress came asking me to help send off her dead husband, a rookie in the criminal investigation unit brought me a headless missing-person case, and a man with two different-colored eyes waited for me beneath a streetlamp, holding a bag of wontons. I solved every case, and each one led to another clue. All the trails converged on the same person: my grandfather, Qin Tiekou.
Grandpa was gone, leaving behind a room full of old books, half a handwritten manuscript, the words “The roots lie in the old house,” and a scrap of paper that read “Do not look for me.” Following the clues, I uncovered something called the Shan Hai Project, a secret undertaking that began in the 1950s. It studied how a person's bone structure and vital energy channels could be transferred intact to another body. Physiognomy, fate reading, and paranormal powers were mixed together to create a new god.
At the other end of the trail was Cheng Ye, whose unusual bone structure made him capable of inheriting anyone's vital energy channels. Cheng Ye disappeared ten years ago. When he appeared again, his eyes had been transplanted into someone else's sockets. On my fifth day running the Pavilion of Celestial Secrets, I received Grandpa's final message: “July 18, at noon, the nursery in the western suburbs...”
It's terrifying to watch!