In the seventeenth year of the Republic, bizarre cases ran rampant in Jiangcheng.
A white-clad ghost on a theater stage claimed lives, divination cards in a sealed room foretold death, and water ghosts hauled corpses at the docks... Every strange case was a con staged with tricks of the underworld. The Western-style police station only believed in fingerprints and physical evidence, and was helpless in the face of the city’s ghost stories.
Chen Yan, who ran a fortune-telling stall on the street, was the first to get caught in the crossfire. On the surface, he was a silver-tongued fortune-teller who could chat about feng shui with rich merchants and shoot the breeze with beggars, making his way through life with nothing but his gift of the gab. In truth, ten years ago he had been the greatest figure in the underworld, mastering the arts of deception, sleight of hand, and illusion. He was known as the Ghost-Faced Buddha.
A bronze divination coin unique to him made him the prime suspect in a sealed-room murder, and he was thrown in jail. No one expected this carefree fortune-teller to recreate the sealed-room trick in court with a single strand of fishing line, talk the police chief into silence, and prove his innocence on the spot.
From then on, the police station had a special consultant to solve bizarre cases involving underworld tricks. From a puppet scheme at the opera house to a gambling den’s debt of a thousand lives and a corpse borrowed from a desolate grave, he exposed every deception with a stream of jokes and banter. But he never expected that the serial murders concealed a bloody case from his sect ten years earlier. His former fellow disciples had turned their arts to evil and laid a deadly trap to lure him back into the underworld.
There have never been ghosts or gods in this world. No matter how deadly the illusion, it can never outmatch the light and darkness of the human heart, or a silver tongue that can expose every falsehood.
