In the spring of the Jiashen year, the Meishan fireworks caused by Chongzhen's suicide burned down Shen'an's imperial examination road.
He was once the son of the head of the Ministry of Industry and a promising candidate, but on the day Li Zicheng broke into the city, he saw his father being put into a prison car and his ancestral home became a stable for the invading troops. In order to survive, this scholar who was accustomed to holding a calligraphy pen squatted in the Xisi Archway with a wooden board for "valet book", writing letters home for the soldiers who missed Mizhi's hometown, and drafting contracts for the refugees who were fighting for half a piece of cornstarch. What is being ground in the inkstone is no longer Hui ink, but the humiliation and survival calculations in troubled times.
Until the scarred knife sharpener Lao Dao appeared and dragged him deeper into the darkness - it turned out that the Ming Dynasty was not dead, and the "Night Owl" spies were lurking throughout the capital, and his pen, which was used to writing beautiful articles, could actually become a sharp weapon to spy on the intelligence of the Dashun Army. He began to hide passwords in letters and bury clues in pleadings: Liu Zongmin's tyranny, Niu Jinxing's power struggle, and the factional rifts within the Dashun Army were all memorized in his mind in small regular script, becoming the sharpest knife of "Night Owl".
When he extracted the secret of "The King's Heart and the Treasure" from the royal merchant Qian Runzhi, and when the street cake stall became a stronghold for transmitting information, Shen An finally understood: "Stay alive" as his father said before his death was never about surviving. He wanted to hide his family letters from Chuang Jun's knife, protect Uncle Fu in the shadow of Dongchang, and use this pen stained with blood and tears, in the ashes of the Jiashen year, to write a belated, blood-based ink of love for the nameless souls and the broken country.
