Night Laws of Chang'an: No Night Watchman at the Fifth Watch

[Mystery · Supernatural · Political Intrigue] After failing the imperial examinations five times, the good-for-nothing scholar Lu Jinghong is left with nowhere to turn. He tears down a recruitment notice and joins Chang'an’s most mysterious secret bureau: the Nightwatch Office. By day, he’s a low-ranking night watchman earning two taels in salary. At night, he patrols the streets with a watchman’s drum hanging from his waist. Whenever the drum sounds, the final moments of the dead flood into his mind. Three courtesans vanish without a trace from Pingkang Ward. The doors and windows are locked from the inside, and the plaster on the walls is covered in words gouged out with fingernails: “Don’t sound the watchman’s drum.” Following the trail left by an embroidered shoe, he tracks it underground, only to discover a vast network of spirit mines beneath the entire city of Shengjing, spanning three hundred years. Three hundred years of resentment has clenched into a fist within the mineral veins. His missing father, his dead junior fellow apprentice, and the faceless ghosts swallowed by the mines are all waiting for someone who can strike the watchman’s drum a seventh time. They say the night watchmen are the guardians of the Sheng Dynasty. But no one tells you that Shengjing at night is never inhabited by the living alone. When the watchman’s drum sounds, life and death split into two paths. Who does this Nightwatch Law protect: the living, or the dead?