In the winter of the forty-second year of Wanli, blood and snow fell in Jinling, the important financial town in the south of the Yangtze River. When checking the accounts, Gu Yanzhi, the chief clerk of the Nanjing Ministry of Household Affairs, discovered that the tax figures of Shaoxing Prefecture for five consecutive years were exactly the same - this "absolutely accurate" abnormal data, like the wings of a chilling cicada, set off a dark game that spanned twenty years.
