The Gavel in the Furrows

When Lin Yuan, a vocational school student, was bullied to the brink of death, he activated two Systems: a “Justice System” that could invoke Article 234 of the Criminal Law, and a “Pastoral System” that let him cultivate wasteland on the outskirts of the city. At the judicial academy, he used the distribution of weed roots to solve a case involving a body buried on campus. At a law firm, he used the growth cycles of crops to disprove a suspect’s alibi. The Pastoral System’s “Crop Memory” feature gradually revealed its eerie side: the sunflowers he grew turned toward the location of crime scenes, while grafted grapevines could store fragments of surveillance footage.

When he was drawn into the shady dealings between officials and businessmen among the upper classes, Lin Yuan opened a detective agency on his ecological farm, disguising an underground evidence-analysis room as a greenhouse for organic vegetables. Li Yuxin, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, once cut one of his tomato plants with a special-ops dagger, accidentally activating a hidden System feature. The juice leaking from the plant’s wound revealed a smuggling route used by an international criminal syndicate. When the two Systems suddenly warned him, “Host has a dual identity,” Lin Yuan discovered that every plant he had cultivated corresponded to a name on a list of criminals awaiting judgment, and buried three meters beneath the farm was the corpse of “another him,” someone he had never met.