The Strange Cases of Nanzhou

【Decisive, formidable beauty heroine × arrogant, unruly wolf-drinking male lead】 It rains three hundred days a year in Nanzhou, and one mysterious case after another unfolds in Yulin County. Gu Qichuan, a rising star at court, was demoted to Nanzhou after causing the Crown Prince to fall from his horse. Just after he arrived in Yulin County, a young boy was found hanged from the sacred tree. The furious locals condemned him and his servant, insisting they be thrown into the river to appease the wrath of the gods. At the height of the confrontation, Xia Chou arrived in a plain sedan chair, pale as a ghost and beautiful as a demon. Carrying a handwritten letter from the Buddhist patriarch, she helped Gu Qichuan out of trouble. People say she is the frail female adviser kept by the county lieutenant, powerless to harm even a chicken and liable to fall over in a breeze. But when Gu Qichuan saw her wield a knife with swift precision during an autopsy and face her enemies without flinching, he couldn't see a trace of weakness in her. 【The Rain-Bound Child】: A boy helped his father sober up one night, but by morning he was hanging upside down beneath the sacred tree. The torrential rain washed the corpse until it was unrecognizable, but people claimed he had been chosen by the gods and that his family was blessed with boundless Buddhist merit. Gu Qichuan looked at the boy's drunken father, his mother who had left home, and his scheming uncle. If that family had Buddhist merit, then the Buddha had gone blind! And the Buddha had indeed gone blind. Driven by greed and incestuous lust, they had made sure the Buddha's eyes could see nothing, and the boy had died unjustly. 【The Beauty's Heads】: During the Ghost Buddha Festival, the water-splashing celebration brings nobles and officials together at Nanzhou's finest tower for seven days and seven nights of revelry. They arrive in high spirits and should leave satisfied! But on the day they depart, seven headless young women's bodies are suddenly found in the rooms of four wealthy households. Seven beautiful heads drift slowly downstream along the Meilan River. Their faces are crossed with knife wounds, their flesh split open and swollen from the water, and festival flowers that should have been pinned in their hair rest between their lips. 【Serpents and Plague】: Nanzhou's warm, damp climate is perfect for raising snakes, but the imperial court has issued an order: every snake in the region must be driven out, and no local may keep one. The ban has been in place for ten years. At the beginning of the eleventh spring, a sudden scraping of scales sounds from the bottom of a well in the prefectural governor's courtyard, like hundreds or thousands of snakes tangled together. The governor orders the well sealed and searched for snakes, while rumors spread through the streets that a snake plague is coming. Sure enough, eleven days later, the plague breaks out! A strict perfectionist was tortured into becoming a cripple after losing a battle. An undefeated, unruly general rode without pause for ten days, yet still arrived too late, forced to watch the person he revered be pierced by a rain of arrows. Their brutal past came to an abrupt end, but the hatred left behind haunted them every night. For three years, Nanzhou's situation grew increasingly volatile: the Buddhist sect controlled people's minds, wealthy merchants monopolized trade, and foreign powers watched hungrily from the sidelines. Three years later, Xia Chou finally escaped from prison. Her body covered in scars, she became the beautiful adviser of Yulin County. Gu Qichuan also struck a deal with the new emperor and successfully got himself demoted to magistrate of Yulin County in Nanzhou Prefecture. Both had paid a price they could never take back. Now that they had returned, they had only one purpose: to kill their enemy with their own hands, pierce his throat, and cut off his head. PS: 1. Both leads are strong. 【The heroine must be strong! The kind of woman who can hold her own even without the male lead.】＆【The male lead must be strong too, or how could he deserve her?】 2. Mystery-solving + light political intrigue + protecting the people. The people are worth protecting too ❤【We know the common folk can betray you, but let them be a little more heartwarming in this story. Most importantly, the leads don't save ungrateful people.】 3. Mutual suspicion + testing and tension + secret identities revealed 4. Happy ending, one-on-one, exceptionally strong mutual love【No exes, no angsty bitterness, no emotional self-destruction】 5. No doting-wife plot + no children Theme: I will take your head and offer it to the spirits of our unjustly slain soldiers