Stolen Shadow

Stolen Shadow is an early full-length mystery by the Shanghai crime writer Shi Chen, roughly 116,000 characters long. The story begins with an act of casual petty theft: Wu You, an unemployed young man, picks up a brand-new phone left behind on the subway, and when he gets home and looks through it, he discovers that it contains several videos filmed by the phone's owner—footage that records a murder. Half disbelieving, Wu You goes that night to the location shown in the video to check, and actually digs a pile of female corpses out of the muddy ground of an orchard, only to be spotted by the orchard owner who suddenly arrives, forcing him to flee. Worse still, in his panic he leaves the phone at the scene, and since it holds his personal information, anyone would assume the murder footage was his. The next day Wu You is wanted nationwide, and the real killer learns his name from the news. With no leads and unable to recall the face of the phone's owner on the subway, Wu You must act as his own detective to uncover the truth, his life hanging by a thread under the double pressure of a police manhunt and the killer's pursuit. The work continues Shi Chen's customary classical honkaku approach, driving the mystery through a chain of predicaments—finding the phone, discovering the evidence of the crime, being framed in turn—that invites readers to solve the puzzle alongside the protagonist.