Closed Door Ceremony

Late autumn of 1929, Furong County. Xu Jin, a young judicial official in the provincial capital, refused to sign the verdict of an unjust case and was assigned to serve as a judicial examiner in this "Three No Matters" county, surrounded by water on three sides and backed by mountains on one side. On the day he arrived, he encountered a bizarre murder. In the Du family ancestral hall, the patriarch Du Chengzong was killed by a bronze lamp stand falling from the sky in front of dancers wearing fierce god Nuo masks during the annual "closed-door Nuo sacrifice" ceremony that was prohibited to outsiders. Everyone has an alibi. The villagers said that this was a divine punishment from the "Judge of Nuo God". Subsequently, people died one after another in the county. The method of death corresponded to the "Judge seduces the soul" passage in Nuo opera. The bodies of the deceased were covered with sentences written in yellow paper and cinnabar - "unfilial", "unchaste" and "unjust". When Xu Jin tried to use fingerprints, blood stains, and physical evidence to trace the truth, he found that he was facing not only a cunning murderer, but also the intricate clan forces in Furong County, Paoge Pier, and a mysterious writing called "Nvshu." The ghosts of the old era have not yet dispersed, and the dawn of the new world has yet to arrive. In a gray area where the law fails, Xu Jin must make a bloody choice between procedural justice and substantive justice.