During the Chongzhen period, the Ming Dynasty was like a candle in the wind. The internal party struggle between the Donglin Party and the eunuch Party was in full swing, and the Hou Jin cavalry was eyeing it outside. Successive years of drought in the northwest have resulted in thousands of miles of red land. Japanese pirates and maritime merchant forces on the southeast coast are secretly playing games. Under the red walls and golden tiles of the Forbidden City, intrigues and blood and tears are intertwined into a giant web that swallows up the empire.
Shen Mo, a scholar from a poor family, entered the court with the ambition of "making a living for the people". He shocked the general examination with his article "On the Strangeness of the People of the Ming Dynasty" and was accepted as a disciple by Zhou Yanru, the leader of the Donglin Party. When he first entered officialdom, he witnessed the miserable situation of refugees on the streets of Suzhou, and he stood up angrily. From then on, he was involved in the fierce confrontation between the elite of the court and the powerful group. With the support of his mentor Zhou Yanru, he started as a seventh-rank county magistrate and emerged in disaster relief and rebellion and rectification of officialdom. However, he also became a thorn in the side of conservative forces such as the powerful minister Qian Qianyi.
In the painted boat on the banks of the Qinhuai River, the secret talks between Qian Qianyi, the leader of the Donglin Party, and Zheng Zhilong, the king of Fujian, are hidden; in Quanzhou Port, three thousand miles away, a lucky ship carrying new firearms and overseas intelligence is secretly setting sail. When Shen Mo discovered irrefutable evidence that the frontier army's food and salary were being exploited layer by layer in the northwest border, a big game concerning the life and death of the empire was quietly unfolding - some people were planning the final madness under the crooked neck tree in Meishan, and some were weaving a blueprint for changing the world in the misty rain in the south of the Yangtze River.
This epic masterpiece takes the rise and fall of the Chongzhen Dynasty in seventeen years as the main line. Through the perspective of the fictional character Shen Mo, it connects real historical events and legendary stories. The work not only shows major historical scenes such as Yuan Chonghuan's Ningyuan rebellion against the Jin Dynasty and Li Zicheng's uprising, but also fictionalizes the secret war between the maritime business group and the court forces.
