On the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1920, Shen Henian, the richest man in Jingang, died at a full-moon banquet. He clutched a green jade chess piece in his hand. On the board lay three pieces that should not have been there.
The scent-reader of the Variegated Pavilion, the shadow killer of the Night, and the artisan of the Relic Appraisal House: the three hidden sects each possessed their own strange arts. Though they had never met, all three received a chessboard on the same night. Someone had made four cities into a chessboard and living people into pieces, laying out a game that had been thirty years in the making. Every move pointed to the same answer: all things coexist, and it begins with one person's death.
Li Song, whose sense of smell reached to the bone; Lin Sheng, who held back his blade at the last moment; and Murong Xiaoxiao, who recognized objects but not people. Each held a piece, pursuing the trail from Jingang to Yunxi, then fighting their way from Yunxi to Yuzhou. But they discovered that someone had died in every city, and each victim had left half a sentence behind. When the mist finally cleared, the mastermind was the person they respected most: the old pavilion master, who should have died thirty years ago, still sat at the heart of the game.
Cities for pieces, people for shadows. You think you're breaking the game, but you're one of its players, too.
