Synopsis for A Cold Inkstone Stained with Blood: Full 300-Word Version
Her mentor is dead.
The Imperial Medical Academy called it a sudden illness, swift to arrive and just as swift to pass. His colleagues murmured a few words of condolence, paid their respects, and soon left.
Chen Yan didn’t believe it.
The candles flickered in the mourning hall. He knelt for three days, finally waiting until the dead of night, when all was quiet. He pushed the coffin lid open a crack. His mentor lay inside, his face ashen, but his right hand was clenched tight. When Chen pried it open, he found a bloodstained shard of porcelain in the palm.
Blue-and-white porcelain, decorated with intertwined lotus vines, its glaze smooth and lustrous. It was the kind of gift bestowed only by the Imperial Palace.
But Lu Wenyuan, his mentor, had been a poor senior Hanlin scholar all his life. His home was furnished with nothing but coarse porcelain bowls and dishes. This shard didn’t belong in this room.
Suddenly, footsteps sounded outside the door. A eunuch “passing by” in the middle of the night left him a single sentence through the white mourning drapes:
“Some things are best left in the past.”
It was both a warning and a test.
Chen Yan knelt back on the cushion, his back ramrod straight. From this moment on, he knew, he could cast aside both his seemingly peaceful career in government and the mask of mild courtesy and humility.
From the deeds to underpriced farmland in Qingtian Village to the wrongful examination case of the Wuwu year, he follows his mentor’s unfinished investigation, drawing closer to the abyss with every step. The archive clerk’s hesitation, the inexplicable kindness of a Ministry of Revenue official, the tearful plea of a victim’s sister who stops him in the rain: shadows follow close behind every step he takes.
He can only keep wearing the mask of a “bookish fool” as he walks along the edge of a blade.
Because his mentor’s last words still ring in his ears:
“Watch closely. Think carefully. Speak little.”
Speak little, because speaking won’t do any good.
If he investigates further, he may die. If he doesn’t, his mentor will have died for nothing.
