During the Shaosheng period of the Northern Song Dynasty, Li Yan, the jailer of Bianliang, was a general who was dismissed for his military achievements and was imprisoned in the city camp. In the troubled times of power struggle and party aggression, he held an ancestral ring-headed sword and guarded a dark prison.
When he was forced to get involved in the life-and-death game between the imperial censor Qin Ming and the powerful prime minister Cai Jing, and when shocking and mysterious cases such as border army embezzlement, salt and iron collusion with the enemy, and imperial assassinations broke through the prison door one after another, this ninth-level official discovered that what he was guarding was no longer a prisoner, but the dirtiest secret of the dynasty.
"A scholar dies for a confidant."
The bowl of wine handed over by Qin Ming, Fan Zhengqing's words "I know you" in prison, the blood letter from the man in the frontier army, the deathbed entrustment of the old warden... "Confidants" who fell into darkness one by one forced him onto a road from which he could not turn back.
From the prison in Kaifeng Mansion to the border gate of Shaanxi Province, from the inscription on the book of sinners to the ironclad evidence that shakes the government and the opposition, Li Yan, as a jailer and with the ambition of a snow-blade, redraws the bottom line in a place where the law has collapsed, and guards the innocence when people's hearts are corrupted.
