When Heshen, who held unrivaled power and was richer than the state during the Qianlong reign, died in an accident and returned to the underworld, he discovered that his life hadn't ended. Instead, he had bizarrely been reborn several centuries earlier, in the body of Bao Zheng, the Kaifeng prefect of the Great Song and the “Dark-Faced Judge Bao”!
It was the ultimate irony, an absurd joke. Heshen, accustomed to fine clothes and rich food, wielding power at will, and treating corruption as a rule of survival, had suddenly been stuffed into the body of an incorruptible official, clean-handed and revered by the people. He had to face a life so austere it could only be called “impoverished,” and deal with subordinates who quoted the law and radiated righteousness, including Gongsun Ce, overflowing with clever schemes but far too “rigid,” and Zhan Zhao, a formidable martial artist who stubbornly followed the rules. Worse still, the body seemed to retain some of its former owner's accursed sense of justice, which kept interfering whenever Heshen wanted to “bend the rules for convenience”!
From the start, he was plunged into a thorny imperial examination fraud case, with a former student of his serving as chief examiner. While serving in Luzhou, he invented a “disaster index” to identify corruption, only to be forced to cover the shortfall out of his own pocket. On an inspection tour of Jiangnan, he used the knowledge from his previous life to unravel the mystery of the salt administration, but had to personally burn the ledgers recording his own past bribes... Heshen discovered that the “corrupt official's wisdom” he had honed over decades in government, reading people, understanding their motives, using money to get his way, and setting traps, had unexpected “results” in the fight against corruption!
This is a story of mistaken identity, the clash of good and evil, and the search for order amid darkness. Watch as a notorious power broker is forced by the tides of history to become, or perhaps redefine, an upright and incorruptible official.
