The Hunt
命悬一生
A 16-episode iQIYI suspense drama about a delivery driver who opens a wooden box on a mountain and finds his friend's body, then watches a decade of lies come apart.
Save- Premiere
- Oct 11, 2025
- Episodes
- 16
- Where to watch
- iQIYI
- Also known as
- 一生悬命
About the drama
Most mystery series ask who did it. The Hunt (命悬一生, Ming Xuan Yi Sheng, "a life on the line") is more interested in how ordinary people end up in a corner they cannot get out of. It starts with a delivery and a corpse, then slows down and spends its 16 episodes on the people around the box.
It premiered on October 11, 2025 on iQIYI's Mist Theater (迷雾剧场, Miwu Juchang), the platform's suspense label. The Global Times reported a Douban score of 7.6 and called it among the best-received Mist Theater series in about two years. A Tencent News feature said iQIYI's heat index passed 8,200 by the member finale on October 23.
Its method is the draw. The story is told in fragments from several points of view, so one night can look different depending on who is remembering it, and the series keeps asking why people made the choices they did.
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Ni Xiangdong (倪向东, played by Yin Fang, 尹昉) is a delivery man. His friend Cao Xiaojun (曹小军, Bai Yufan, 白宇帆) asks him to carry a wooden box to an abandoned hut in the hills. Inside he finds Cao's body. Cao's wife, Wu Ximei (吴细妹, Li Gengxi, 李庚希), reports it to the police and steers suspicion toward Ni. Detective Meng Chao (孟朝, Zhang Zhehua, 张哲华) takes the case and finds that the three of them are tied together by something that goes back about ten years. Xu Qingli (徐庆利, Huang Xuan, 黄轩) is also drawn into it.
The look supports the mood. Reviewers praised the damp southern town, peeling walls and dim yellow streetlights, with 1990s clothes and household objects.
The series is set in a small southern town in the 1990s, and the case follows its characters over roughly a decade. It is adapted from the novel Yi Sheng Xuan Ming (一生悬命, "a whole life at stake") by Lu Chunwu (陆春吾), who also wrote the screenplay. The novel was serialized on Douban Read (豆瓣阅读), where it took first place on the 2022 annual "suspense and fantasy" list.
The directors are Sun Molong (孙墨龙), whose earlier credits include Minning Town (山海情) and Reset (开端), and Shi Chengye (史成业), who has worked as a cinematographer on Wild Wonderful (边水往事) and All Is Well (都挺好). The Global Times review ties Sun's habit of writing people, not just plots, to the series' focus on its ensemble.
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