In the spring of Yongxi Year Twelve, Gu Tingzhao, Vice Minister of Revenue, was sentenced to death by imperial decree. His entire household was confiscated, and his only son, Gu Huaijin, was imprisoned as an accomplice. Everyone said the Gu family was finished.
No one knew that the boy awaiting death in prison had received a new soul three days earlier: one from a thousand years in the future. He neither cried nor complained. He simply worked through three questions: Why didn't the weight of the burned military grain add up? Which waterway had the switched grain taken? And what was hidden in the eight words his father spoke before dying?
From then on, the court had a new "traitor's son." Wherever he went, trouble followed: grain supplies burned, salt-tax revenues vanished, military pay was embezzled, and the imperial examinations were rigged. Everyone waited to see him struck dead by lightning, but every time, he walked away from the storm and even dug up the people buried beneath it. The emperor wanted him dead, yet couldn't quite bring himself to kill him, and so he said, "Let's wait a little longer."
What he didn't know was that his father had left behind not an heirloom, but a web woven over twenty years. Salt and grain sustained half the court. Gu Huaijin followed the trail from the death-row prison all the way to the Golden Throne Hall, closing his father's net and winning the throne for himself.
