In 2004, Shen Yan, a restorer of ancient books at Tingyuzhai, a secondhand bookstore in the old city, received a registered letter that should not have existed.
The sender was named Shen Chengzhou.
He was Shen Yan's father, who had been missing for eighteen years.
The envelope was dry, but water clung to its outer cover. A small lamp was embossed on the red wax seal, with seven short marks beneath it. There was no letter inside, only half a page of an epitaph rubbing scorched by fire.
Using the techniques he applied to restoring broken stone tablets, Shen Yan painstakingly pieced it together and discovered his own name hidden at the end of the epitaph.
From that night on, the old objects around him began acting strangely.
His shadow lagged three breaths behind him.
Words written in water surfaced in an old notebook.
A postman who had been dead for years resumed delivering old letters.
In the ancestral hall of a deserted village, there were no names of ancestors, only a row of blank wooden tablets.
Someone beneath the well asked in his father's voice: "Has someone from the Shen family come?"
To uncover the truth behind his father's disappearance, Shen Yan is drawn step by step into the old case of the Nightwatch Lamp alongside Bai Lu, a former criminal-investigation technician; Lu Linzhou, a traditional tomb raider; Qi Pangzi, a fast-talking man with an extraordinarily chaotic fate; and Xu Zhaowei, a folklorist who possesses the remnants of the Xu family's song.
The brick tomb at Shiyugou, the underground river palace at Qingmendu, the bone tower in the Miao Mountains, the Black City in the Northwest, the sea-lantern sunken coffin, the echoes of the snow mountains, and the tomb without a stele in the imperial mausoleum... Seven tombs correspond to seven lamps, and to seven prices.
Name, shadow, bone, voice, dream, blood, memory.
Everyone believes the Nightwatch Lamp can bring the dead back to life.
Only later does Shen Yan understand what it truly does: it slowly turns the living into the dead.
The letter his father left behind was no last testament. It was a path, eighteen years too late.
At the end of that path lies a list of the living titled The Nightwatch Record.
On the last page, the final stroke of Shen Yan's name is missing.
