During the Yongchang era of the Great Liang dynasty, the Astronomical Bureau was struck with alarm when the earth convulsed. In the rockery behind the prefect's residence, someone heard the echoes of the dead.
Shen Weilan, a convict's son, was born with a pair of “landscape eyes.” He could trace the veins of mountains and rivers, and uncover the injustices buried with the dead.
On a stormy night, he dreamed that his late father, Shen Shen, sat up in his coffin, soaked to the skin, with a palm-sized blue-black bruise seared into his chest. His father violently shoved him into a pool of liquid mercury.
When he awoke, all that remained on his desk was a single silvery-gray bead of mercury, cold and eerie as an eye.
“Gold turns black when it meets mercury, and people die when they meet mercury.”
Su Yunzhen, a female coroner, pierced bone with a silver needle and coldly exposed the prefect's lie about a “feng shui alchemy furnace.”
From then on, he had a copy of Remedies for Injustice and two iron surveying compasses.
Following the mineral veins recorded in Tiangong Kaiwu, he traced the tributaries described in Commentary on the Waterways Classic.
From the bizarre corpse transformations of the kiln workers known as the “Blue Hands” to the deadly plot involving a “river of mercury” in the imperial tomb's underground palace…
This game was a gamble for the dragon vein, and a fight for the emperor's life.
This dream brought buried injustices to light and shattered the quest for immortality.
“Father, look closely. There are no immortal elixirs in this world, only cinnabar that devours people.
How many lives did that one ‘immortality pill’ take, all to grant one person an undying name?”
This article starts with a side story