How can a stone crush a dynasty?
In the second year of Xuanhe's reign, General Yang Zhi took on the most important imperial mission in his life: to transport "Little Xiegu", a rare stone from Taihu Lake, to Tokyo to decorate the royal garden Genyue. This seemingly glorious journey to promotion turns out to be a direct passage to hell.
He witnessed with his own eyes that wherever Huang Seal went, families were destroyed and people died; in order to transport huge rocks, the thousand-year-old water gate was demolished and the lifeline of water transportation was cut off. When he tried to uphold justice within the rules, he found that the entire bureaucracy, from subordinates to powerful ministers, was completely rotten. On a stormy night on the Yellow River, the ship sank and capsized, and the dedicated military officer became a prisoner of the imperial court overnight.
In exile, he went deep into the hinterland of the Hua Shi Gang disaster and witnessed how this prosperous project of "prospering Henan" hollowed out the foundation of the Song Dynasty and became the fuse of Fangla's uprising. When he holds an account book that records heinous evidence of crimes, he faces the ultimate choice: accept pardon in exchange for personal vindication, or give up everything and cry out for the countless innocent souls at the bottom of the canal?
A novel that combines the spirit of "Water Margin" with the micro-historical perspective of "Chang'an's Lychee". It tells the rise and fall of empires in a strange stone.
