The Shanhai Tribunal

I can see the colors of evil. The price is that I’m slowly going blind.

Xi Chi, a socially anxious artist, has a secret: at any crime scene, he can “see” the emotional traces left behind by the culprit. Fear is emerald green, anger is dark purple, and despair is a viscous black mist. It is a side effect of a genetic experiment conducted twenty-two years ago.

But the ability has one fatal flaw: every time he uses it, his right eye goes blind for ten seconds.

The head of the criminal investigation unit, Xian Qingye, does not believe in this kind of “superstition,” until Xi Chi uses an anonymous painting to predict a second murder with pinpoint accuracy, while the police have no leads at all.

A three-legged Golden Crow mural on the wall of an abandoned factory, a metal feather tucked into a fragment of an ancient text, and a symbol identical to one at the scene of an unsolved case from twenty years ago...

Every clue points to an ancient copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas that should not exist.

But as they dig deeper, Xi Chi realizes that what he “sees” is not the truth, but a trap carefully laid over the course of twenty-two years.

“What you see is all what she, your mother, wants you to see.”

The mountains and seas are the crime scene; the mythical beasts are the evidence. In this scheme spanning two generations, he is both the only key and the only sacrifice.