You Asked Me to Set Up a Stall and Copy Books, but I Shocked the Entire Court

After staying up all night preparing lessons, modern legal studies lecturer Shen Yan wakes to find himself a destitute scholar in Qingshi County of the Great Yong, with nothing but bare walls to his name.

His father died of illness just six months ago, and now the clan chief has shown up with a forged IOU for twelve taels, demanding repayment.

They’re taking the ancestral home and the paddy fields, selling his nine-year-old sister to the Qian family as a servant, and forcing his widowed mother to kneel in the snow and beg for mercy.

If they won’t listen to reason, then he’ll make them listen to the laws of the Great Yong.

He exposes the fake IOU in public and forces the clan chief to draw up a new contract. He has to come up with three taels of silver within three days to save his family.

No money?

Then he’ll write legal petitions for people, help the county magistrate quell a civil disturbance, draft a petition for famine relief, and turn a pile of scrap paper into affordable primers for everyone.

Before long, he has saved the elderly mother of a fallen soldier, quelled a riot in which hundreds of starving people stormed a granary, and earned the favor of the emperor’s tutor.

With money, a good reputation, and a path to the imperial examinations finally within reach, he thinks things are getting back on track.

But the Shen clan chief takes his money and refuses to issue the certificate proving his innocence. Then the young master of the Qian family forges his primers, slips seditious passages into the hands of schoolchildren, and turns around to accuse Shen Yan of treason.

He was just about to rely on the imperial examinations to protect his family, but instead he ends up behind bars in the county yamen.

If they want to use clan rules to crush him, power to silence him, and false evidence to destroy him, then he’ll use the brush in his hand to write about every corrupt official, crooked merchant, and injustice in the Great Yong!