The plum rain in Qingshi Lane is soaked with blood and rust. Sixteen-year-old Jiang Shuo encounters a murder in an abandoned silkworm factory: the body of Chen Lu, the school belle, is curled up in a pile of silkworm cocoons. Her right kidney is missing, and half a copper cicada engraved with the word "zhou" is clutched tightly in her palm. Hearing-impaired girl Lin Wan witnessed the dumping of a body, but her sign language testimony was misinterpreted as a confession of theft. On the night when the real murderer pushed Lin Wan into the bottom of the awning boat in the name of "River God Sacrifice", Jiang Shuo hid the copper cicada and sealed the truth.
Nine years later, detective Jiang Shuo returns to his hometown to investigate the serial kidney-cutting case. The stitches on the deceased's wound look like fish bones - exactly the same as the old scar on the back of Chen Lu's neck. When the only insider drowned silently in the culvert of the ancestral hall, and when Lin Wan recorded the sneer of the richest man Zhou Baichuan on his hearing aid: "It's time for the cicada to shed its shell," the sins wrapped in silk were finally unraveled: the kidney transplant recipients on the poverty alleviation list, the underage kidneys floating in the glass jars in the cellar, the unburned organ ledgers in the tinfoil ingots... And the words "two months pregnant" on Chen Lu's autopsy report made Jiang Shuo's gun-raising hand tremble violently in the ancestral hall on a rainy night.
Deep in the mist of the water town, the map pieced together by copper cicadas points to thousands of bones at the bottom of the river. Lin Wan smashed his hearing aid, and Zhou Baichuan's confession pierced the rain curtain with the current: "The sound of the cicada landing behind the silkworm rack saved your life that year." The truth is like a cicada that sheds its shell, shaking off fifteen years of bloody rain when it flutters its wings - it turns out that the atonement has already devoured the flesh and blood of the victim, and the silent witness will eventually compose a requiem for Jiangnan with soul-shattering audio.
Purpose: Solve crimes in small towns