During the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty, an anti-corruption storm swept across the country. Zheng Tu, the prosecutor and execution officer, harbors a deep hatred and becomes the emperor's sharpest knife, but in the fishy wind of peeling off the real grass, he sees the truth: meager salary drives honest officials to become corrupt, and harsh punishments give rise to more secretive corruption. Fang Yan, a surviving clerk in the household department, used his pen as a blade to record the absurdity of the movement in the cracks of the account books, and secretly subverted the imperial power in the "Punishment of Corruption". Farmer Chen Ying was awarded the title of "Yiyi Min" for kidnapping a corrupt official, but eventually became a sacrifice in the power game. When the blood of the Kongyin case was still wet, the innocent souls of the Guo Huan case screamed, and the butcher knife of the Lanyu case reappeared, the three of them were trapped in a whirlpool - Zheng Tu sewed the emperor's perjury into a human fur bag and sacrificed it in death; Fang Yan fled to the end of the world with the truth; Chen Ying disappeared in the disillusionment of the populism. When Zhu Yuanzhang lamented that the art of control was exhausted, the shadow play was already doomed: the threads of power shredded ideals, the low-wage system fostered greed, and all struggles turned into a trace of blood on the curtain.
