On the day Pei Zhiyuan graduated from high school, Jiang Mingzhao thought three years of hardship had finally paid off. Seven days later, her mother-in-law died under mysterious circumstances, and her husband produced a confession he had written long ago, personally sending her to face trial.
The poison was found in her trunk, her maid identified her in person, and every piece of evidence forced her to admit to a capital crime.
But Pei Zhiyuan had forgotten that the laws he had studied and the case documents he had written were all taught to him, word by word, by Jiang Mingzhao.
Starting with a bowl of soup someone had moved, she exposed false testimony, found witnesses, and broke the deadlock. In the end, she cleared her name and formally severed ties with her unfaithful husband in court.
Everyone waited to see how a woman cast out by her husband's family would survive. Instead, she hung a sign reading "Mingzhao Legal Writing Office" in the south of the city, drafting petitions and seeking justice for those with nowhere else to turn.
A bloodstained wedding dress, a missing bride, a stolen dowry... One case after another came knocking, drawing her toward an even greater secret behind her mother-in-law's murder.
Xie Wujie, Assistant Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, had solved the world's most puzzling cases and never trusted anyone easily. But later, he was willing to investigate old cases with Jiang Mingzhao and walk the city's long streets by her side, watching her use a single petition to win justice for women trapped in desperate circumstances.
