Behind Liu He, the Marquis of Haihun, lies a pair of intertwined stories of life and death. In the first year of the Yuanping era of the Western Han Dynasty, Liu He, the King of Changyi, received an imperial decree summoning him to the palace to succeed to the throne, only to be deposed and demoted to commoner status within a mere 27 days-making him the shortest-reigning emperor in two millennia. Throughout this ordeal, some wished for his death, while others wished for his survival; yet he himself could not have cared less. In the sixth year of the Jian'an era of the Eastern Han Dynasty, a batch of gold ingots secretly made its way into the Yuzhang market, and Liu Ji, a commoner, was assigned to assist in the investigation. Plots of the living, artifacts of the dead-guided by clues from one luxurious burial offering after another, the investigation unexpectedly uncovered a tomb-raiding scheme that would shake the Jiangdong region to its core. One was a debauched emperor of a past dynasty; the other, a man cast aside by later generations. Though separated by a century and the divide between the living and the dead, they felt their lives gradually converging.
