Beneath the flourishing literary age of the Great Yong dynasty, corruption and exam fraud in the Confucian schools have become deeply entrenched. Shen Qingji takes refuge at Huaishan Academy, where his extraordinary memory and deductive skills allow him to secretly compile a complete set of corruption ledgers. When his student Lian Shaozhen exposes the plagiarism of a powerful family’s son and is framed in return, Shen joins forces with Wei Shuci, an itinerant Confucian scholar gathering evidence. Together, they expose one fraudulent corruption scheme after another: those of powerful families, manufactured child prodigies, and the Five Classics laureates who monopolize the literary world. They travel across five provinces to root out academic parasites and submit a memorial urging educational reform.
As he investigates, Shen Qingji realizes that every major case he solves just happens to clear the emperor’s political enemies, while every lead involving the royal treasury mysteriously goes cold. A jade token from another world, made from the same source as his own, reveals the truth: the emperor himself, who has let the Confucian scholars line their pockets and intends to use Shen as a tool of political intrigue, is the source of all this chaos and the real hypocrite at the top. Shen is no tool forged by the emperor. Protecting the literary tradition is his own awakened conviction. When the emperor drops the pretense and orders him to keep obeying, Shen refuses to become a pawn, resigns, and returns to Huaishan to teach. The sham Confucians in the public eye are all brought to justice, and the new policies take effect, but human greed is hard to eradicate. Shen devotes himself to cultivating successors who will carry on the way of righteousness, keeping watch alone by lamplight in his western study. His quiet vigil only makes the emperor, who speaks endlessly of benevolent rule while secretly manipulating the realm, seem all the more hypocritical.
