My name is Pei Zhao, but I have been dead for fifteen years. The man who survived is called Shen Du, the son of a minor official who died in a plague. I took his name to study, sit the examinations, and enter the imperial court as an official. In seven years, I passed the jinshi exam. In ten, I became chancellor. In twenty, I became the most powerful man in the Great Yan dynasty.
No one knows who I am. No one knows that every step beneath my feet was paved with the lives of three hundred members of the Pei clan.
Later, I met a woman named Lu Heng. She knew I was an impostor, but wrote a petition for me that called her “Shen Du’s wife.” She had never married me.
I met my mentor, Xie Lin. He taught me political strategy, the Confucian classics, and how to be a good official.
Then I discovered that he was the one who had slaughtered my entire family.
I remembered what my old servant, Pei An, told me as he lay dying: “Young master, live on. Not for revenge. Just to live.”
But these past twenty years, have I really been living, or have I been walking toward my death?
