The Ming Dynasty Coroner

A medical case, a black umbrella, a stick of incense, a knife, a length of thread, a pot of vinegar, a handkerchief... My teacher once said that no one deserves more respect than the dead, that no case is without a flaw, and that no conspiracy can remain hidden forever. Zhao Moqiu, a Han Chinese man from the Ming Dynasty, was born in 1500, during the Hongzhi era. He has been alive for more than four hundred years. His profession is forensic medicine: centuries ago, people called it examining corpses. The first time he died was on the day the emperor passed away during the Zhengde era, when an arrow pierced his heart and took his life... When he awoke, it was the twentieth year of the Jiajing era. The people and events he once knew had all changed, and he found himself facing things beyond an ordinary person's imagination. The power struggle between Qian Ning and Jiang Bin's factions had ended twenty years earlier, but now he was caught up in a contest for power and profit between the Imperial Guards and the Grand Secretariat. The current emperor had spent the first twenty years of his reign attending to state affairs, but afterward began building Taoist temples everywhere, hoping to stay young forever and achieve immortality... He was more than four hundred years old, yet his appearance had remained that of a twenty-year-old. Over the centuries, he had lived through the fall of two dynasties. Some people sought immortality through mystical arts and alchemy, but their efforts never turned out as they hoped. Zhao Moqiu sometimes sighed that they failed to understand that birth, aging, sickness, and death were the will of Heaven, impossible to defy. Yet he himself was an exception. He had died beneath an arrow and fallen from the city wall. Why had he come back to life? What had happened after he died? These questions had haunted Zhao Moqiu throughout his centuries-long life...