My Reflection Is a Heretic

Seven bodies lie in the mourning hall. Eight memorial tablets stand on the altar. When the girl in the smallest coffin opens her eyes and calls an impossible foreign name, Inspector Shen Zhao hears a stranger answer from inside his own mind. Shen serves the Imperial Bureau of Anomalies, hunting horrors even cultivators cannot kill; Samuel Vane is an inquisitor condemned by the Church that stripped him of office—and an occultist it wants dead. Each believes the other is a symptom of corruption. Then their wounds begin to cross over, their investigations produce matching evidence, and fragments of power answer to both of them. One cultivates qi and searches for the rule beneath the monster; the other carves forbidden rites into bone and hunts for loopholes inside sacred oaths. With the Bureau and the Church closing in, they must use each other's knowledge without surrendering their identities—because something ancient has begun listening through the gap between them, and the next voice to answer may belong to neither man.