A call came from his hometown: “The corpse of the thirteenth generation ancestor has disappeared.” Pan Xiaoyao, still working overtime at a large factory in Shenzhen, assumed it was a criminal case—until that night, when a talking stone appeared in his dream and began cursing at him: “Stupid boy, your whole family is going to kill each other tonight—starting with your uncle. Three days. If you don’t come back, wait for the tooth marks to be collected.” The ancestral stone has a sharp tongue, a scheming mind, and a memory worse than a goldfish’s, but it is Pan Xiaoyao’s only help. He applies programmer logic to debug the formation, uses herbal medicine to treat difficult hospital cases, and relies on the stone tablets to expose the schemes of fake scholars—an ancient defensive array set up by his ancestors, and a “folklorist” with a full set of procedures is counting down to the winter solstice to tear it down. Pan Xiaoyao: “Metaphysics problems should be solved as engineering problems.” The stone tablet replies: “Fine. But you’d better book your flight first—I really can’t protect your uncle’s tooth marks.”
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