Twelve Chimes on the Pendulum

Heavy rain closed the mountain, and twelve ancient bells rang at the same time. Qiao Yuanshan, the owner of the Shilun Pavilion, died in his own clock maze - the study was locked, the key hung on his waist, and the only window was locked from the inside. Detective Lin Mo was invited to appreciate antique clocks, but became a witness to this secret room murder case. There are only three suspects: the housekeeper whose family fortune was taken away by Qiao Yuanshan, the stepdaughter who was controlled for her whole life, and the assistant who was coerced into counterfeiting cultural relics. Everyone confessed, everyone's alibi was perfect, and everyone's confession contained a truth. But Lin Mo discovered a detail that no one noticed: the time displayed by all the clocks was 0.5 Seconds slower. This was not a murder. This is a "time cage" built with thirty years of hatred - the murderer did not kill one person, but wanted to trap everyone in the same rainy night so that the truth would never be heard. When the second headless corpse popped out of the bird clock, Lin Mo realized that the assistant's time perception had long been eroded by poison, and everything he recorded was untrustworthy. The Time Wheel Pavilion itself is a huge mechanical trap. Its foundation is gears and its walls are clockwork. The entire building will collapse in three days due to the shift in its center of gravity. The only thing that can reverse all this is a national treasure armillary clock that was stolen thirty years ago. Its core component-the "absolute level"-is hidden in the place where the murderer touches it every day. Lin Mo had to rely solely on the sound of gears biting, the frequency of a pendulum swing, and an autistic girl using the pendulum to move around without being able to recognize anyone at all (he suffered from prosopagnosia).