In the capital of the Great Yin Dynasty, a bridal sedan was carried into the Marquis's residence. The bride inside, however, had already been dead for three days. Everyone said it was a ghost marriage demanding a life, but Shen Zhiwei, the coroner's orphaned daughter, saw at a glance that this was an elaborate corpse-concealment plot. The wrongful case that had ruined her family ten years earlier had reduced her to the lowest social status, but her skill at examining corpses led Xie Linzhou, a junior official of the Court of Judicial Review, to bring her into the depths of a series of bizarre cases. A statue of Buddha weeping blood, paper figures carrying a coffin, a headless corpse on a snowy night, a banquet for a hundred ghosts... With every case she solved, she came one step closer to the truth behind the massacre of her family. But when an old corpse was brought back to light, she discovered that the secret her father had died trying to conceal was powerful enough to shake the entire Great Yin court.