In the 23rd year of Yongjia in the Dayin Dynasty, Lin Yan, the number one scholar from a poor family, bluntly spoke out about the shortcomings of water transportation in the imperial examination, and splashed the first drop of blood on the jade steps. From the Hanlin Academy to Jiangnan officialdom, from the lobby of the Ministry of Justice to the cabinet duty room, he learned to forge evidence in the salt tax case, and was forced to sacrifice his close friends in the witchcraft disaster. When he finally became a powerful minister, he found that the New Deal he promoted had turned into a weapon of exploitation.
When the disciples were torn apart by Ling Chi's cries before being executed, and when his wife burned her secret letters of collaboration with the enemy and coughed up blood and died, this idealist who once determined to "clear the dust from the jade steps" personally threw his life's memorials into the brazier. After thirty years of ups and downs in the officialdom, he overthrew family members, manipulated imperial power, and compromised the barbarians, but ultimately failed to prevent the dynasty from sliding into the abyss.
Lin Yan, who retired to the countryside in his later years, re-encountered the corrupt methods he had reviled when he was a boy, and wrote the final prophecy in the "Huan Hai Jian" he revised before his death: "Carrion will grow new flesh, and reincarnation will continue for three hundred years." When the historians of the new dynasty were debating his posthumous title, the unopened impeachment memorial was gathering dust, and nursery rhymes outside the window were singing aphorisms from his imperial examination policy...
