Chen Yan opened his eyes to find himself in the Great Zhou Revenue Office, assigned to the low-ranking post of ninth-grade accounting inspector, a perfect scapegoat. His predecessor had just thrown himself into a well, and Chen Yan was expected to take the blame for three hundred taels that didn’t add up.
He planned to accept the blame and coast until retirement. But suddenly, a sky screen appeared overhead, white with black characters, visible to the whole city.
The sky screen had four unbreakable rules: it only displayed accounts he had personally verified and could prove; the more significant the account, the more of his vitality it consumed; it only made information public, never gathered evidence; and it displayed accounts, never accusations like “So-and-so is corrupt.”
The entire court took him for a fool, but he brought one hopeless account after another back to life. They laughed at his “ghostly scribbles,” but he used them to uncover who was falsifying the books.
The deeper he dug, the more he found: from three hundred taels in missing funds to 370,000 shi of grain vanished from Tongzhou’s granary, and then to a nine-year-old case involving a river that nobody could explain.
He didn’t rise through the ranks by defeating anyone. He rose because people accepted the accounts he uncovered.
The officials of the entire court began begging him to stop investigating.
