Two Blank Hours

A fire broke out in the old coastal city, and a charred female corpse was found at the scene. The initial ruling was accidental death. But data analyst Wu Mu spotted something amiss in the unusual smoke marks: three sleeping pills, drag marks pointing the wrong way, and fire-retardant fibers beneath the victim's fingernails. Every clue pointed to the victim's ex-husband, an architect who had been declared dead fifteen years ago.

Three years earlier, in the Clock Tower case, Wu Mu had witnessed his close friend Shen Yi "die" and lost two full hours of memory. That blank stretch had become a black hole he could never fill. Now, this arson case, with its strange burn patterns, pulled him into a vast web of conspiracy spanning six cases: a body-double trick to fake one's death, a murder plot built on psychological manipulation, workplace hunting, an insurance racket profiting from death, and a psychological artisan skilled at reconstructing memories.

Wu Mu stepped into a maze built from precise calculations and fractured personalities. The killer had hidden behind three identities for fifteen years, always orchestrating events from behind the scenes, providing only blueprints and never acting in person. The cases twisted and turned, and his opponent was exceptionally clever. Following the superfluous details in the physical evidence, Wu Mu painstakingly pieced the clues together, tracking the case all the way to the Clock Tower.

When the truth came out, he learned that this had always been a trap laid to close around him. People can make up lies, and physical evidence can vanish with time, but the timetable of the celestial bodies never lies.

This is a long-form modern detective novel, told in a realistic style, with six parts and a total of 48 chapters. The story explores what it means to take responsibility, forcing people to face the selves they dare not acknowledge. It uncovers the secret buried in those two blank hours of memory and culminates in a final confrontation with an opponent who has returned from the dead.