The Sinister Pawnshop: Yin Pawns Steal Your Soul, Living Pawns Cost Your Life!

On a rainy night during the Qingming Festival in 2010, Chen Mo, a disgraced heir to a lineage of traditional Chinese medicine, wipes down a rain-soaked sheepskin coat in a century-old pawnshop. Suddenly, his palm burns. He sees the scene of a murder in the bitter winter of 1997: his father being pushed into a Chinese medicine warehouse. Stitched into the lining of this pawned item is a warehouse key stained with blood. During the first month after he reopens Sanjitang, an insect-eaten ledger reveals a series of mortgages involving Health Bureau officials. Tongrentang’s honey-pill molds are stolen in the dead of night, and his father’s dying words emerge from a gramophone’s brass horn. When a property developer whose holdings have been mortgaged hands over eight boxes of blueprints from the Republic of China era, the red circle on a map of the old city’s air-raid shelters falls directly over the Chen family graveyard. Chen Mo grips the hand that can read a person’s final memories. In account books fumigated with realgar wine, in a blood letter hidden inside an acupuncture bronze mannequin, and in the Nanyang dust shaken from an overseas Chinese merchant’s wooden chest, he pieces together the truth behind a Chinese medicine smuggling case from thirty years ago. Among the forfeited goods sought by foreign pharmaceutical companies lies a cache of Japanese military germ-warfare records capable of destroying half the medical system. When tung oil on the inspection counter reveals the glint of a hidden listening device, he dips his brush in coptis juice and writes on the pawn ticket: Item pawned: My enemy’s life Term: Thirty thousand dawns.