Seven years ago, military provisions went missing in Shuozhou. The garrison ran out of food, and the isolated city fell.
Shen Chongyue, who had been in charge of escorting the provisions, was convicted of treason. The entire Shen family was executed. Seven years later, the sole surviving member, Shen Zhaowei, returned to the capital.
She had no witnesses and no genuine account books, only five blank sheets of ledger paper.
She deliberately spread word that her father had hidden a true ledger of the missing provisions before he died, then sent one blank sheet to each of the five people who had handled the old case.
There wasn’t a single word on the pages, yet each of them saw the secret they feared most would be exposed.
Some burned the granaries. Others tampered with the files or hunted down former soldiers. By following their attempts to destroy the evidence, Shen Zhaowei pieced together the route taken by the missing provisions.
Only Prince Ning, Xiao Chengyan, didn’t take the bait.
He saw through the fake ledger but didn’t expose Shen Zhaowei. Instead, he invited her into his residence: he would give her access to the old case files, and she would help him claim the throne.
Shen Zhaowei agreed.
But as the people involved were arrested one after another, she uncovered something even more terrifying. Every piece of evidence she found just happened to help Prince Ning eliminate a political rival. The closer she got to the truth, the closer he got to the throne.
She had thought she was using Prince Ning’s blade to take revenge.
Only at the very end did she realize that perhaps, from the moment she sent out the first blank page, she had already become someone else’s blade.
