On a rainy night, after closing her stall, Shen Zhiwei brings home a man she found.
He can't even recognize a copper coin, and he can't get a bottle of bruise medicine in exchange for a gold ingot. Yet when a constable overturns her stall, he stops the man's fist with a single move. When she's forced to pay a protection fee, he neatly stacks the entire bag of copper coins.
He has amnesia, barely speaks, and can't look after himself, yet after closing he repairs her leaky roof and pushes the first bowl of hot wontons toward her.
Her wonton stall grows into an eatery, and the eatery expands all the way to the capital. As she investigates her father's old case, he becomes her blade, her bookkeeper, and her strongest ally. She has never relied on anyone along the way.
Until the day armored soldiers kneel in the courtyard and cry out, "My lord!"
Only then does Shen Zhiwei realize that the man she brought home was no down-and-out hired hand.
And the Shen family's old case of embezzlement and suicide turns out to be entwined with the salt smuggling case he has been secretly investigating for years.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
