In the first year of Jingguo's founding, Bianjing.
The day Lin Xu climbed out of prison, he couldn't taste anything at the back of his tongue. Thermal torture burned out his sense of taste and also burned away his twenty-year-old innocence - he was once the youngest tea doctor in the 72 foot shops in Fanlou, and a pot of iron could make the rich and powerful spend huge sums of money. Now he can't even taste the bitterness or sweetness of a bowl of tea stem water.
But he still has one hand. The burn scar on the tiger's mouth on his right hand, every time it hurt, reminded him: Cai Jing's tea horse order had eaten six million guan, and his father - the prime minister of Dali Temple - was demoted to Lingnan Road and died under a lychee tree.
Cai Jing thought that it would be over if he trampled the Lin family to death. He didn't know what Lin Xu had discovered in Jianzhou: there was a scratched-out name in the "Unknown Transfer Documents" case file from the first year of Chongning. That name belongs to the Ji family - the Ji family in Jianzhou, the fourteenth generation descendant of Bahuo. The seventy-seven words of Ji's baking secret can make a piece of tea cake seven years longer out of thin air. Cai Jing's son, Cai You, spent seven years building a network of approval authority in order to stem Ji's anger.
But Ji is still alive. Lin Xu unhooked his left boot and found a camellia on his ankle - thirty-six petals, burned with charcoal. He has been the seventh generation descendant of the Ji family since his birth. Cai You's network of approval rights was hitting the seventy-seven characters in his hand.
"Fire takes three steps - turn on the fourth step. Turn to the seventh step - stop."
This is more than just a game of tea politics. This is the story of a tea man whose sense of taste was destroyed in the darkest days of the Northern Song Dynasty, who used a burned hand and seventy-seven words to tear a hole in Cai Jing's Iron Curtain.
