Great Qin: The Canglan Official

On the third day after Qin Shi Huang unified the realm, Shen Yan woke up as a minor clerk in a county office of the Great Qin.

The bamboo slips before him were still wet with ink, while corpses were already floating in the Jing Canal.

A mistyped water schedule, a seal of an unusual color, and a corpse that should never have died at the canal mouth led to the first canal-diversion case in the outskirts of Xianyang.

One error in the water schedule, and the canal changed course;

One canal changed course, and a village ran out of grain;

One village without grain, and a man went to prison;

One man in prison, and an entire county lived in fear.

In this Great Qin, where the law was iron and officials formed an inescapable net, murderers did not always wield swords. Sometimes all it took was a single character, number, or seal on a bamboo slip.

Shen Yan had no desire to be a saint, nor to overthrow the Great Qin.

He simply took up his knife and brush, starting with the corpse in the Jing Canal. He investigated water rights, granaries, corvee labor, household registers, medicine, prisons, military merit, public works, and official accounts, all the way into the depths of Xianyang’s treasury.

A single character could kill; a single slip could deceive Heaven.

His task was to make sure the suffering of the living found its way onto the records, and the wronged dead were remembered by name.