In the twenty-seventh year of Taiping, the Great Peace reigned. No one knows that something is awakening beneath the prosperous age.
When Shen Yan opened his eyes, he became a poor scholar in Qinghe County - with nothing but an old folding fan of unknown origin and a murder that did not belong to him.
The classmate died beside the moon well in the back hill of the college, and he was the only one present. The county government wanted to close the case and the academy wanted to clear its name. The deceased's family only left one sentence: "Do you know or not?" Everyone believed that he was the murderer.
But Shen Yan knew two things that others didn't know.
First, he has a whole set of skills in his mind that are not of this era.
Second, he could see—he could see the gray shadows that would climb up on the edge of the bloodstains of the deceased; he could see things that had been extinct in this world for thousands of years.
In this dynasty, "seeing" is a capital offense.
So he borrowed a murder case to investigate, and went all the way to the deepest cracks in the prosperous age: an academy that was eager to bury the case in the courtyard wall; an ancient well that had been sealed for ten years, with a darkroom and a bronze mirror at the bottom; a young man who asked "Do you believe me" and never looked back; and the nine monuments that were cracking one by one.
Machiavellianism is the sword, magic is the shadow.
He has no backer and cannot practice. He only has a brain brought from another world and a pair of eyes that no one wants to believe.
Mysticism is the key, not the hand. The real game will always be buried where he can't see it.
