Jiajing fifteenth year, late summer.
In Jingtang Village, Yidu County, Qingzhou Prefecture, Shandong Province, Murong Yuan was beaten to death by a police officer in his field for refusing to put his fingerprints on the food reminder document. The grain was not his family's at all, it was the compensation paid by Wangfu Zhuang's farm.
Eight-year-old Murong Zheng knelt beside his father's body and remembered who he was in his previous life - a historian who studied imperial examinations and local administration in the Ming Dynasty.
He has no system, no panel, and no golden finger that can kill people. All he has is a method of reading history, an imprecise memory of general trends, and an understanding of how this institutional machine operates: who signed it, which link it was stuck in, and who must be held responsible for what.
So he went to Zhang's house to herd cattle, eavesdropped on lectures outside the low wall of the private school, and wrote the first word on the stone slab with mud and water. He has to learn how to write petition papers, because his mother's life depends on that piece of paper; he has to take the county examination, government examination, and college examination, because in the Ming Dynasty, fame is the qualification for serving.
The man who killed his father will not be struck to death by thunder. The uncle who wants to take over the family, the village chief who is eager to fill the tax gap, the squire who hides a dark account, and the Prince Heng's Mansion who is entrenched in Qingzhou - everyone has their own interests, retreats and countermeasures.
He could only climb up inch by inch, using articles, regulations, favors and prices to send these people one by one into the rules they set themselves.
The bloodline of the Murong family of Nanyan has been hidden in this land for more than a thousand years. This time, he didn't plan to rely on the knife.
