Corpse Trick

In the thirty-seventh year of the Jiajing reign of the Dajing Dynasty, Shen Nian, a magician who always wore a bright black hat, came to the busiest "Zuixiang Tower" in the capital. His tricks were so weird that it made people feel numb - the face of a person who died suddenly three days ago could float in the goblet, and a severed finger that was still bleeding could be taken out of the black hat. Even the guest who laughed the most in the audience could suddenly bleed to death after the performance. Lin Hu, the capital's head catcher, stared at the serial murders until the end, but the more he investigated, the more frightened he became: Shen Nian's tricks were not illusions at all, but an "evil puppet show" that had been lost for twenty years, and each performance used the souls of living people as fuel. What's even more frightening is that Shen Nian is actually the orphan of the "Magic Sect" who was exterminated by the royal family twenty years ago. While he used evil tricks to take revenge, he also uncovered the shocking secret that the Dajing royal family relied on refining living corpses to maintain their immortality. Lin Hu discovered that his father was the executioner who destroyed the magic sect, and he himself was entangled in the curse of the evil puppet show during the investigation, and was about to become a "prop" in Shen Nian's magic. In the smell of alcohol and corpses in Zuixianglou, he had to make a choice between "doing justice for heaven" and "complicit in the evil" - but every glass of wine he picked up reflected the face of a dead soul.