In the seventy-two years since the founding of Dayan, the country was divided into thirteen states.
There is a kind of vision in the world called "reverberation".
When a person is in extreme grief, fear, joy or anger, the surrounding objects will leave sounds and images. People who are proficient in the "smell trace technique" can use the ruler to hear these residues from old objects.
However, the reverberation does not equal the truth.
It can only retain what the owner sees, hears and believes. Fear can distort the picture, prejudice can change the voice, and a forger can even burn a person's memory into another artifact.
Eighteen years ago, the "fixed tone bells" of the thirteen states of Dayan rang for no reason on the same night.
When they woke up the next day, hundreds of thousands of people forgot one thing at the same time.
History books call that night "the Night of Nothing."
According to official records, there were no wars, no disasters, and no deaths.
But since then, empty tombs of unknown origin, tablets without names, and old objects that repeat the same sentence every night have appeared in the Thirteen Prefectures:
"The river doesn't rise on its own."
Eighteen years later, a county magistrate died in a secret room.
The doors and windows were closed, there were no wounds on his body, but there was a piece of broken pottery with the names of thirteen states written on it in his mouth.
All the objects in the room left the exact same reverberation——
A rain that never fell at all.
Sang Jianwei, a folk trace master, was ordered to investigate the case and met Lu Zhiheng, the patrol officer of the Ministry of Punishment.
Starting from a murder case in a secret room, the two gradually discovered that Dayan's current peace was based on a disaster that was forgotten by everyone.
The person who personally helped the court erase the truth was Sang Jianwei's mother who had been missing for many years.
