No Trace Along the Riverbank

[1v1, faithful to each other, mystery, deduction] Twenty-eight-year-old Qi Huaichuan is the head of the Criminal Investigation Division of Linjiang Public Security Bureau. Cold and decisive, he believes that evidence is everything. Twenty-two-year-old Lu Qingyan reports for duty as an intern. She is gentle, perceptive, and meticulous in her reasoning. At their first meeting, Qi Huaichuan assumes she’s just a girl looking to pad her résumé and casually dumps a stack of case files on her. He has no idea that her arrival will reopen the unsolved riverside dismemberment case that he’s spent five years trying to crack. A locked-room murder gives Lu Qingyan the chance to show her skill. She spots the one logical flaw in a seemingly perfect chain of evidence, forcing Qi Huaichuan to take this “intern” seriously. From then on, they join forces to uncover the hidden motive behind a domestic abuse victim’s act of self-defense, track down a killer across thousands of miles by following a single datura seed from a body burned in the wilderness, and stand side by side through a series of revenge killings sparked by exam fraud. With every case they solve, Lu Qingyan proves herself and sheds another label, while Qi Huaichuan’s defenses soften a little more.