The Yellow Emperor's Curse

The Yellow Emperor's Curse is one of Hu Yanyun's representative works. A revised new edition was released by New Star Press in 2024 and included in the "Midnight Library · Original Series." The book imagines an ancient and eerie profession—the "death-diviner": it is said that the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon is not merely a medical text but also conceals a strange art that can predict a person's time of death and even kill through a "death-divining incantation." The novel opens with three packages containing human remains delivered one after another to Lei Rong, the nation's foremost female forensic pathologist. The sender leaves a taunt: if you cannot find me, I will let this curse-killing art spread like a plague. Lei Rong has less than eight hours. The country's four great mystery clubs gather, yet none can solve the riddle of the curse killings; instead, they fall into infighting over an old case from fourteen years ago—at that crime scene, too, someone recited a terrifying incantation, and the murder method has never been solved. To uncover a horrifying truth hidden for thousands of years, Lei Rong opens the Washing Away of Wrongs, written by the Song dynasty forensic scientist Song Ci, and suddenly feels a chill: the real killer seems already to be standing behind her. Built on the framework of honkaku mystery, the novel weaves together traditional Chinese pulse diagnosis, ancient-text forensic examination, modern forensic medicine, and criminal investigation techniques. Through intricately interlocking multiple plotlines, it stages a head-on collision between traditional mystical culture and modern crime deduction, making it an important work in Hu Yanyun's exploration of a "localized" path for mystery fiction.