At the capital's charitable mortuary, Shen Yan, son of an autopsy examiner, has three "bone fragments" embedded in his left wrist, taken from people who died unnatural deaths. When pressed against a bone, they let him see the dead person's final nine breaths. Twelve years ago, his parents burned to bones without names in a crematorium fire. The authorities closed the case with just four words: "Demons are at work." Twelve years later, the first corpse to "walk home on its own" lies at his doorstep, half of a governor's private seal carved into its bones. With his autopsy knife in hand, Shen Yan barges into the grounds of the Directorate of Heavenly Hearings and runs into a woman who should not be there either: Jiang Zhao, deputy director of the Bureau of Strange Records. She can hear sounds lingering in objects, and the entire city is hunting her as a "witch." One trusts only the dead, the other only inanimate things. Each time he reads bones, he loses body heat and memories; each time she listens to an object's echo, she suffers deafness and ringing ears. Starting out as suspects in each other's eyes, they examine bones, listen for echoes, and dig through old records, dragging the capital's most respectable living men one by one before the corpse examination table. Meanwhile, Governor Pei, praised by thousands and an advocate of "a world without demons," must burn away a day of his own lifespan and a memory from his past every time he alters a cause of death. Smiling, he writes their names onto the next destruction list, yet he never dares kill them first, because the dead are the hardest evidence in the world to burn away.
