Chen Xiaoman is sixteen years old. He has spent ten years tending lamps in the City God Temple's lamp room. On the night of the ninth day of the eleventh lunar month, one of the ninety-nine ever-burning lamps, alight for three hundred years, went out. He begins his investigation with that dead lamp: a missing child, watered-down lamp oil, falsified records maintained for three hundred years, the emperor's life-prolonging lamp, and the brush used to write in the Nine Pavilions
