Golden Needles in the Bone: The Chief Medical Examiner's Thousand-Year Contract

In her previous life, Shen Qinghe was the Dali Temple's foremost female coroner. With golden needles, she examined bones and cracked one bizarre case after another. But when she and Gu Yan, the imperial court's chief investigator, were framed by treacherous schemers, they drank poison and died in the line of duty, buried together in a cold coffin.

When she opened her eyes again, she had become a notorious “failing student” in a forensic science department, brilliant in practice but terrible at theory. She constantly ranked near the bottom on written exams and stumbled through modern forensic protocols, yet she possessed a family-inherited mastery of ancient bone examination. In practical classes, she could spot hidden causes of death at a glance, even ones the professors missed.

With debt collectors at her door and expulsion looming, Gu Chenzhou, chief forensic pathologist at the city criminal investigation bureau, offered her a marriage contract. He was the industry's acknowledged gold standard, a man whose scalpel never made a mistake. For twenty years, he had dreamed of a blurry figure in ancient clothes standing beside an autopsy table. The contract would last a year: she would bring good fortune to his gravely ill grandmother, receive an annual salary of a million, and follow strict rules. When the term ended, they would go their separate ways.

She signed on, hoping to use the stability to establish herself with her ancient methods. But the chief's rules proved sharper than a scalpel. He scolded her for handling evidence without authorization, staying up all night examining bodies and forgetting to eat, and risking her life by going to crime scenes alone. He even gave her the cold shoulder when she discussed cases with a senior male colleague.

Everyone was waiting to see the failing student's contract wife thrown out, until a string of dismemberment cases hit a dead end. She used her golden needles and bone examination skills to identify the killer, only to be denounced by industry experts as a practitioner of unorthodox methods.

The usually impassive Gu Chenzhou broke the rules for the first time, defending her in public. Using modern forensic principles such as microstructural analysis of bone tissue and projections based on bacterial decomposition, he verified each of her conclusions down to the smallest detail. “Her methods are ancient, but her conclusions are scientifically sound. If you want to question her, question me first.”

This marriage of convenience, which seemed like a chance arrangement, was really a long-planned reunion he had schemed toward across a thousand years of reincarnation.