Ink-Stained Empire: The Final Letter

Ten years ago, thirty thousand soldiers of Dingyuan City perished on a snowy night.

Ten years later, the ink on the general’s blood-written final letter was still wet.

Shen Qi was the most inconspicuous book mender in the capital’s ghost market.

She could hear the writing of the dead speak. The instant her fingertips touched the ink, the writer’s final heartbeat, fear, and despair would surge over her like a tide and swallow her whole.

This forbidden art was called “Entering the Ink.”

The price was that each time she mended a final letter, one of her senses was taken from her.

Gu Yanqing, a Vice Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, came looking for her.

He produced a letter. The ink had not dried in ten years, and turned to blood in the wind. It was the farewell letter of Zhou Mian, the General of Dingyuan. The court claimed he had killed himself out of guilt, but when Shen Qi entered the ink, she saw a lone commander defending a besieged city, cut off from supplies and betrayed. On a snowy night forty degrees below zero, he had dipped his frozen fingers in the blood from his own heart and written a letter.

He was waiting.

Waiting for someone who could understand the truth.

Gu Yanqing said, “Fix it, and I’ll spare your life.”

What Shen Qi didn’t know was that this man, known as “Lord Gu the King of Hell,” suffered splitting headaches whenever he saw official documents. Only the final letters of the dead could bring him a moment of peace.

She also didn’t know that her father and his father had died in the same fire twenty years ago.

What truth had been buried in the “Jia Shen Book Burning Case,” the fire that destroyed half the Imperial Academy and burned countless history books?

She was his eyes; he was her blade.

Two drowning people would dredge the darkest secret of an empire from a sea of lies on paper.