Greed's Algorithm

In 1928 Harbin, the assassination of Zhang Zuolin has plunged Manchuria into a lawless power vacuum. Gourmet detective Lin Ziyu, a disillusioned former imperial scholar, is drawn into a series of antique frauds that systematically bankrupt old-guard families, triggering parricide and bloody vendettas. His investigation leads to a renegade White Russian scientist and his "Desire Calculating Engine"—a mechanical algorithm that dissects ancestral pride and hidden shame with terrifying precision, exposing that a machine understands our darkest materialistic greed better than we understand ourselves.