Xie Yungui, a researcher at the Institute of Ancient Texts of the Academy of Social Sciences, accidentally transmigrated while collating Tang dynasty classics. He arrived in Chang'an in the first year of Yongchun, becoming a ninth-rank county deputy in Wannian County. At the time, Guanzhong was suffering a severe drought, taxes were crushingly high, and Wannian, a county within the capital, was buried under a mountain of unresolved cases. Newly appointed and holding a bronze fish tally, Xie relied on his mastery of Tang law to confront the tangled power networks within the county office. The veteran clerk Wang Biao colluded with Lu, a judicial assistant from the Jingzhao Prefecture, and Zheng, an aide in charge of household affairs, to seize the people's silt-rich farmland under cover of the disaster, fabricating one wrongful lawsuit after another. Xie Yungui joined forces with the bailiff Zhang Shisan and the former clerk Zhang De, poring over long-sealed case files, checking cadastral registers, and reopening old land disputes to win back farmland for ordinary people. Beneath the turbulent surface of the court, the powerful protected one another, while false accusations and intercepted letters came one after another. Xie pretended to yield as he maneuvered around them, all the while collecting evidence of their crimes. Caught between the letter of the law and the reality of the world, amid the storms of Yongchun, he defended the livelihoods of ordinary people and fought the deeply entrenched corruption of the officialdom.
