My name is Li Minglei. I was once a scholar who cited classics in the Imperial Academy of Shu. Now, I am just a humble official at the Dujiangyan construction site. My job is to carve the names of dozens of people on bamboo slips, and then use cold ink to cross out some of them forever. In this land of massacre of flesh and blood, I witnessed the most magnificent engineering will of the Qin State, and also witnessed the cruelest price behind it.
The county governor Li Bing and his stern son Li Erlang embrace the ideal of "irrigating vast hectares and benefiting the future", and regard human life as a tear that can be calculated on the drawing. In their eyes, the "fish mouth" that symbolizes great achievements, in the eyes of us common people, is an altar made of countless bones. I dealt with the cruel and corrupt supervisor Zhao Ji and various companions struggling to survive, trying to keep the last inch of scholar's conscience between the humiliation of national subjugation and the pursuit of self-improvement.
However, when a man named "Shi Tou" used his resistance to sacrifice the first tucai, when an innocent young man passed away in my arms, and when the bamboo slips stained with the blood of fellow villagers were imprinted on my heart, I finally understood that it was a sin to watch from the sidelines. I began to use lies and strategic weapons to provoke a silent war inside this huge man-eating machine. From a living recorder to an avenger who uses his pen as his sword, I have carved all the sins and truths into a volume of "Records of Tears and Blood" with an unknown destiny, trying to comfort the countless silent souls under the fish's mouth, which is equivalent to asking the heaviest question of this era.
