Xu Heshu is a brilliant suspense novelist with a secret habit: on page thirteen of every manuscript, he uses invisible ink to record the real crimes that inspired the story.
Lin Zhihan is a top forensic pathologist who believes in absolute reason. Assigned to investigate a series of murders imitating scenes from novels, she finds that all the evidence points to the author Xu Heshu. But she alone notices that at every crime scene, the killer has left the taunting number "13."
They should be "enemies of truth" in parallel worlds, but a series of murders that perfectly recreate scenes from novels forces their paths to cross. Lin Zhihan is the only one who notices the same eerie mark, "13," at every scene, and every piece of evidence points to Xu Heshu.
The two, neither trusting the other, are forced to work together. One deciphers the codes of the human heart from yellowed pages written in invisible ink; the other verifies scientific evidence on a cold autopsy table. Reason and imagination collide with a crash as they pursue a ghostly reader who knows the truth hidden on every "page thirteen."
But when the final hidden page is revealed, they discover the killer isn't trying to imitate the stories, but to "correct" them. The killer is writing the two of them into an irreversible tragedy as the protagonists of the final chapter.
When fiction begins to devour reality, the only way to break the deadlock is for the mystery-maker with a pen and the solver with a scalpel to become each other's sole accomplices in the depths of despair.
Theme: When fiction and evidence must corroborate each other to catch a reader who uses stories to kill, the author with a pen and the forensic pathologist with a scalpel sign the same contract of complicity.
