The Green Beetle Project

Before the Suizao Campaign in 1939, the situation in Xianjiang City in northwestern Hubei was turbulent, with a tangled web of competing forces.

Young Liu Muchu had just returned from studying overseas. On the way home with his father, he was inexplicably attacked by armed bandits. But they clearly weren't after the wealthy Master Liu's money, nor were they seeking revenge against him.

After narrowly escaping, Liu Muchu immediately realized the ambush might have been aimed at him. More precisely, the attackers might have wanted to retrieve a fountain pen from him.

The pen was utterly ordinary, except for a distinctive little insect engraved on its casing. His father told him it was a qingfu, a legendary symbol of wealth that never runs out, and that many money houses had used it as an emblem since ancient times. Neither father nor son realized that Liu Muchu had already been drawn into the Qingfu Plan, devised by the Military Statistics Bureau to combat the Japanese army's counterfeit currency flooding the country. Counterfeit notes were increasingly common in Xianjiang City, and the Liu family was caught up in the crisis.

With a major battle imminent, the Liu family's Hanxin Bank took on the military's payroll-cashing business. But after a million in cash was delivered to divisional headquarters, it had all "turned into" counterfeit notes. Unlike the previous minor trouble involving five-yuan bills, this new wave of counterfeits directly threatened the foundations of the Liu family's business. With the family on the brink of collapse, Liu Muchu, who had never intended to inherit the family business, had no choice but to step forward and try to uncover the real culprit behind the conspiracy at the heart of the counterfeit currency case.