The Bizarre Cases of Bianjing

In the third year of the Qingli era, my father, Gu Yanzhao, was branded a traitor and executed before the northwestern army. They said he had secretly sold military weapons and deserved to die a thousand deaths. But I know that before he died, my father used his blood to draw a crooked wolf's head on the wooden side of his prison cart. Three years later, I became an obscure clerk in Kaifeng Prefecture, spending every day poring over old case files in search of any trace connected to a wolf. Then one night, Li Wenyuan, a clerk at the Directorate of Military Equipment, was found floating by the lakeside pavilion in Bianjing. His face was serene, his body unmarked. Only beneath the skin of his back appeared a final message written in invisible ink: "Yongfeng is colluding with the enemy. Firearms are headed southeast. The wolf is inside." I thought it was just a bizarre murder case, but it brought palace eunuchs to seize people in the dead of night, inexplicable obstruction from the Ministry of Justice, and Canal Gang assassins pursuing us along the Grand Canal. What chilled me even more was seeing my father's seal on half a ledger recovered from Li Wenyuan's home. Only then did I understand: my father's death, the corpse by the lakeside pavilion, the fine iron vanishing from the shipping routes, the mysterious Yongfeng granary on the southeastern coast, and the Liao kingdom's White Wolf Banner appearing at the border were all connected. And I, Gu Qingfeng, a mere civil clerk who couldn't hurt a fly, had no choice but to clutch the secret-agent tiger tally I'd stumbled upon and set out on this perilous path with Yan Mingyu, a remarkable young woman and Bianjing's finest coroner, and Zhao Chuang, a constable with years of experience in the martial world. Between the shadows of the palace, the blades of the Canal Gang, the iron hooves of the border army, and a vast organization called the Wolf's Head, we must carve out a way to survive. This is about more than clearing my father's name. I must drag out the hand hidden behind the Dragon Throne.