Daoguang 18th year, Beijing.
The Qing Empire was like an old giant ship that slowly sank on the eve of the Opium War.
And at the foot of the imperial city, Mu Qixian, a teacher with a blue flag in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was still struggling to make ends meet with a few taels of silver. He thought that his life would be like what he wrote in his diary "Recording Dreams in the Free Window": drinking tea, watching theater, teaching, and dying.
Until that day, he was drafted into the palace of Prince Dun as an official.
He originally thought it was a ladder across classes, but he didn't know it was a slide leading to hell.
Because of an accidental integrity, he came into contact with the deepest secret of the palace - a "black prison" hidden behind a high wall and kept secret for sixteen years.
There is no law here, only the moody lynching of Prince Miankai; there is no time here, just hundreds of forgotten prisoners rotting in despair.
When Mu Qixian was thrown into this endless darkness, outside the high wall, his weak wife Chen Wan wiped away her tears.
Facing the closed doors, the yamen protected by officials, and the indifferent and numb spectators, this illiterate woman decided to do the craziest thing in the world:
She wants to use her egg-like body to break that indestructible royal rock.
This is a chronicle of captivity and freedom.
When power becomes a beast, the dignity of ordinary people is the last weapon.
