Lu Zhao, a modern-day surgeon, opens his eyes to find himself a nineteen-year-old apprentice coroner in the lowly registered class during the Xining era of the Northern Song Dynasty.
Lowborn and young, he is someone anyone in the county yamen can shove around.
On his very first day at work, a licentiate dies in the county prison, and his superiors pressure him to sign a report certifying the death as an illness. At a glance, he can tell the man was beaten to death during interrogation. But signing the report means vouching for it, and if the case is overturned, the lowborn signatory will take the blame.
He refuses to sign, only to be framed as a condemned prisoner himself, scheduled for execution in seven days.
No one listens to his pleas. The only thing left to him is a final recourse: a retrial by a different official, with the original judge recused, a review procedure only a death-row prisoner can request.
In front of a hall full of officials, he overturns his own case using a report that someone has tampered with.
In his previous life, he spent twenty years at the operating table of a top-tier hospital. Now, when others see a wound, he sees how the victim died.
From the county prison to the prefectural prison, from the northwestern military camps to the Judicial Commission, he climbs ever higher. Anyone who underestimates him ends up falling into his hands. The reports his rivals signed themselves ultimately become evidence of their own crimes.
They think he is young and easy to bully. In truth, he is older than every high official in the room.
Later, when even a retrial by a different official is no longer enough, he decides to build a machine himself, one that makes lies hard to sustain: a forensic examination protocol that prevents reports from being falsified and wrongful convictions from being concealed.
