In the sixth year of Shaoding in the Southern Song Dynasty, the most expensive piece of official paper in Lin'an City was used to wrap a dead fish.
Wenren Zhaoye, the government clerk, recognized a bizarre lawsuit from the paper: a widow who had been buried thirteen years ago actually "personally" sued and won a millionaire's worth of Sha Tin in Lin'an Prefecture yesterday. What's even more strange is that the verdict is fair in every word, and it also cites the old rules of protecting the weak and restraining the powerful. Some people are not forging evil laws, but are actually seizing property in the name of justice.
A piece of fish-wrapped paper revealed 372 households whose names had been erased, and also revealed layers of household registrations, land deeds, warehouse grain and human relationships in Lin'an City. Teruo and the decorator Miao Tingyun followed the paper grain, ink color and deletion marks in the documents, hoping to re-write the names of those who had been squeezed out of the book. But they soon discovered that what was really difficult to distinguish was not only truth from falsehood, but also who was saved and who was sacrificed after a good government came to the world.
The tide is coming, can one verdict suppress the lights of thousands of families?
