Secret Files of Lin’an

My name is Chen Xiu. Before I transmigrated, I was a PhD in archival studies from a top-tier university. After transmigrating, I became an eighth-rank assistant magistrate in Lin’an Prefecture. Put simply, I’m in charge of the archives. On my first day at work, the dust in the archive vault nearly killed me. Yellowing case files were piled into mountains, and mice had made themselves at home among them. My colleagues shook their heads. “This place hasn’t produced a capable person in three hundred years.” Three hundred years without a capable person? That’s because you don’t understand classification systems. I whittled bamboo strips into index cards and numbered and sorted every case file. I drew up tables and timelines, linking chaotic fragments of information into chains of evidence. The old coroner couldn’t make sense of it and called me “a bookworm messing around.” Then one day, an unidentified corpse arrived from the public burial ground. Everyone said it was a robbery and murder, and prepared to close the case without further investigation. But a speck of cinnabar beneath the victim’s fingernail led me to five unsolved case files that supposedly had nothing to do with one another. My superior was stunned. “What kind of sorcery is this?” I smiled. “It’s not sorcery. It’s logic.” But I never expected that behind these case files lay a secret organization called the Other Shore Society. Nor did I expect them to possess a book recording the scandals and vulnerabilities of every high-ranking official in the court. Least of all did I expect that when a powerful minister set fire to the archive vault, thinking he could destroy all the evidence, I would point to my head and say: “Sorry, I have backups of every file.”