In the twenty-seventh year of Da Yongjinghe's reign, there were successive floods, the treasury was empty, and the war in the north was still ongoing.
A granary in Qishui County suddenly caught fire during a heavy rain.
Shen Zhaoye, a female scribe who copied the household registers for the county government, was ordered to compile the list of the dead, but she saw her name on the first page.
That night, another female corpse wearing her household ID appeared outside the city gate. There were seven grains of uncooked rice stuffed in the mouth of the corpse, and a death document written three days in advance was hidden in the lapel of his clothes.
There were six living people who "died" together with Shen Zhaoye:
The postman Lu Tingzhou who delivered the death document, the female doctor He Sanchun who was accused of spreading the plague, the county magistrate Wei Wence who personally signed the number of disasters, the river engineer Pei Guanlan who was responsible for surveying the New River, the boat girl who controlled the private ferry Liu Jinglu, and an old grain official who has disappeared.
In order to prove that they are alive, they are forced to leave the city together. During the investigation, they discovered that local officials were defrauding food relief by falsely reporting deaths, and water transport companies used the identities of these "dead people" to transfer food. What's even more frightening is that a large number of people who were listed as dead on their household registrations were being secretly taken to Xinji Canal to become river workers who did not need to pay wages or investigate deaths and injuries.
Shen Zhaoye and others gradually moved from "finding their own names" to "leaving evidence for all the nameless people". However, as the investigation deepened, they had to face a more cruel problem:
Is it still right to reveal the truth if it will stop work in Xinhe, cut off military rations, and starve more people to death?
