When he opened his eyes, criminal police officer Shen Lang had become a condemned prisoner in a Ming dynasty prison, on the eve of the dynasty’s fall.
He was to be executed at Wumen Gate tomorrow. His crime: colluding with the enemy and betraying his country.
He had no golden finger and no System cheat. The only thing he had brought with him was the mindset of a modern criminal investigator:
How to find holes in a lie, how to seize control of an interrogation, and how to make his enemies reluctant to let him die.
But he soon discovered...
This was no simple case of collusion at the border. It was a power struggle that had spread from Liaodong all the way to the capital.
The Embroidered Uniform Guard, the Eastern Depot, and the ministers at court: everyone was fabricating testimony, and everyone was erasing traces.
And he, a nobody who should have died on the execution ground, had become the only person who “couldn’t be written to death” in the confession.
If he wanted to live, he had to make the investigation grow bigger and bigger.
If he wanted to live, he had to make the people behind the scenes more afraid of his death.
If he wanted to live, he had to turn the imperial prison into a chessboard and himself into a bargaining chip.
In this age, as the empire teetered on the brink of collapse,
he wasn’t trying to be a hero
He was trying to become the one person nobody dared to kill lightly.
