In the twelfth year of the Shaoxing reign of the Southern Song (1142 CE), the political climate is turbulent and the bureaucracy is mired in deep-rooted corruption. After his father, a retired official of the sixth rank, dies, the twenty-two-year-old Song Weili, a young man with little skill in poetry or the classics, unexpectedly receives a ninth-rank county registrar post through the hereditary privilege system. This is the story of his struggle to survive and grow in the treacherous world of officialdom.
