When the Wind Rises Over the Sky

With a single coin, he determines the fate of the realm. With half a folding fan, he breaks a thousand schemes.

Xia Yiming has a copper coin.

It's no divine weapon, just an ordinary Kaiyuan Tongbao coin. A red cord runs through it, letting it hang from his waist. When he spins it, it looks like the divination coins in a fortune-teller's hand.

Yet with that coin alone, he solves the case of three million taels of silver that "vanished" from the canal transport system, exposes a thirty-year-long conspiracy in which a dead butcher used corpses to cheat death, and upends the power struggle among three princes vying for the throne. In the end, even the twenty years of his own life turn out to be pieces on someone else's board.

He has six friends by his side:

Shen Buwen, a blind zither player who can hear a scheme in the sounds around him, and the only mirror he has;

Ye Wucuo, a swordsman who draws his blade only once in his life, his final trump card;

Jia Sanshou, a thousand-handed master thief whose mouth is quicker than his hands, his most chaotic yet most accurate variable;

Yuan Zhen, a talkative monk who hides truths in his rambling, his greatest intelligence network;

Gu Qianfan, an iron-faced constable who pursued him for three years, then became the official pressure he trusts least and cannot do without;

and Liu Rumei, the capital's leading opera star and the orphaned descendant of the previous dynasty, whose performance can make people give up their lives.

She asks him, "Are you inside the game or outside it?"

He says, "I'm inside it."

She asks again, "Then whose game are you in?"

He is silent for a long time, then says, "That's the answer I'm looking for."

From the misty rains of Jiangnan to the bloody storms of the capital, from the undercurrents of the martial world to the schemes of the imperial court, Xia Yiming travels on, breaking one plot after another.

But in the end, he discovers that the greatest scheme was not laid for him by someone else.

It was his own.