Southern Archives: Sea Salt Lost Control for Her

[Secret files of Nanyang + female-led mystery + a golden finger that hears bones + powerful leads drawn to each other + reunion after a century + tomb-raiding ensemble + one-on-one romance]

In the early years of the Republic of China, twenty-four-year-old Shen Zhaowan was the youngest Chinese interpreter at the Penang police station, and the only child to survive a massacre. She had a secret she could never reveal: by touching human bones, she could hear the most powerful memory the deceased had experienced in life.

The price was that each time she heard a dead person’s secret, she lost a little more of her own past.

At a murder scene on a rainy night, Zhang Haiyan from the Southern Archives held a knife to her throat. The man grinned with careless menace. “Miss Shen, why was the corpse in your room poisoned with my toxin?”

From pretending to be husband and wife aboard a ship to attending a banquet in red, sharing breath in an underwater tomb, and testing each other with aphrodisiac incense, they schemed against one another even as they took turns saving each other from deadly traps. Until Shen Zhaowan discovered that she herself was the last living key to the Nanyang immortality experiment.

To seal the “Sunless City” beneath the sea, she fell into a deep sleep in a crystal coffin. Zhang Haiyan promised to wait for her, but never said it would take seventy years.

When she opened her eyes again, Wu Xie was examining her coffin, Wang Pangzi was calculating how much it could sell for, and Zhang Qiling recognized the ancient aura about her from across the crowd. As for the man who had guarded her for most of a century, he simply placed a knife in her hand. “It’s all right if you don’t remember. Investigate me again, get to know me again, then decide whether you want to love me.”