In the winter of 1984, Zeng Zhi, a technician at Jiangcheng's Hongxing Machinery Plant, is publicly jilted by his fiancée, the daughter of the Liu family. His good friend Zhao Zhengcheng then slips a bundle of "stolen parts" into his toolbox, intending to make him a textbook case of profiteering. Just as Zeng Zhi is at the end of his rope, the ancestral Qingtian Seal suddenly awakens. When he touches an old object, he can hear its owner's deepest secrets.
An old toolbox clears his name; a warehouse requisition slip exposes Zhao Zhengcheng's shady accounts from stealing and selling bearings. Zeng Zhi steps out of the scrap yard and into Jiangcheng's antiques market, where he buys a Song-dynasty Qingbai porcelain piece for five yuan and sells it to the Friendship Store, earning his first foreign currency and meeting Shen Zhiyu, a Hong Kong businesswoman who's neither wholly righteous nor wholly wicked. She works alongside him to investigate cases, yet keeps a close eye on the Qingtian Seal in his hand.
Zhao Zhengcheng hates him, watches him, and tries again and again to destroy him, only to be outsmarted by his object-hearing ability every time. But the higher Zeng Zhi climbs, the more he discovers that the deepest envy in the world lies hidden in a century-old undercurrent in the antiques trade. He must find out why his father's name and identity were changed, and, with the line against smuggling national treasures at stake, accept Shen Zhiyu's sincere love. Good and evil, love and law, old objects and human hearts: from the night his engagement was broken, they have all become entangled.
