Treasure Appraisal: I Can See the Past Lives of Antiques!

After three years as an apprentice at an antiques shop, Shen Yan spends most of his days wiping dust, running errands, and dealing with the fakes nobody wants.

Then, on the eve of Jubaozhai's closure, he touches a Republic-era imitation painting that is about to be thrown away.

In that instant, he sees the painting's past: eighty years ago, a mounter hid an authentic Ming dynasty painting in a concealed layer at its center, and left half of a mysterious "Returning Crane Seal" on the back.

Other people authenticate antiques by examining their patina, inscriptions, and provenance. Shen Yan can see a moment from an antique's past.

A forger mixing aged mud under lamplight, tomb raiders hauling bronze treasures out of a burial passage, a destitute calligrapher and painter trading his last painting for medicine, guardians amid the flames of war packing a national treasure into a crate bound overseas...

But what he sees are only incomplete fragments, not answers. To have the truth recognized by the world, he still has to find evidence and confront forgers, auction houses, wealthy collectors, and the international black market in cultural relics.

When the hidden painting brings him his first earnings, an unfamiliar phone call follows:

"Where did you see that Returning Crane Seal?"

Only then does Shen Yan learn that there were twenty-seven national treasures secretly numbered back then.

The seventh remains in China.

The other twenty-six have all vanished overseas.