The Last Generation of Medicine Men

The Great Yu Empire has enjoyed a century of peace, but the Grand Canal has fallen silent, and the realm teeters on the brink of chaos. Feng Jian is an unambitious wandering physician. His medical skills are passable, his martial arts mediocre, and all he wants in life is to save enough for the journey north and open a small clinic. That changes when he fishes a drowned accountant out of the dead-reed marshes. Sewn into the victim's clothes is half a piece of black jade; in his arms, a ledger filled with symbols no one can decipher. Using his knack for bookkeeping and his remarkable memory, Feng Jian untangles the accounts and investigates a poisoning. What begins with yellow powder in the water leads to illegal arms shipments; what starts in the river marshes leads to a mine deep in the mountains. At last, the other half of the black jade comes to light. When the two pieces are joined, a massacre from eighty years ago, in which an entire family was wiped out under the pretext of a