At the Court of Judicial Review, I Clear My Father’s Name After His Treason Conviction

On the seventh day of the twelfth lunar month, my father's case files are to be burned to ashes.

His name was Gu Zhiyuan. In the twelfth year of the Chengtai era, he was convicted of treason and plotting rebellion. His entire family was confiscated, and I was the only one who escaped, at eight years old.

Twenty years later, bearing my benefactor's surname and using the household registration of a dead man, I take a seat in the Dali Temple's chief clerk's office and reclaim the seal my father once held. Everyone at the temple thinks I'm just Shen, a cold-faced clerk who handles dirty cases. No one recognizes me.

Inside a rice shop locked from the inside, a murder has been staged as a suicide by someone fearing prosecution. Beneath a government cellar sealed for twenty years, a copper inventory token is wedged between the finger bones of a skeleton. Nine abandoned cellars correspond to the Nine Palaces, and someone has been altering an old file for a full twenty years.

The fire is to be lit in seven days. Those in the know are dying one by one of "sudden illness." The people must be purged, and the records must be erased too.

I don't believe in ghosts. I believe in a single stroke of incorrect ink.

Commandant Pei of the Imperial Guard, whose smile hides a knife, is investigating his father's murder. We distrust each other, but as we investigate, we come to trust each other with our backs.

At the end of this case lies an imperial edict the current prime minister has suppressed for twenty years.

They warn me: "You mustn't read this file. If you do, you'll meet the same end as your father."

How convenient.

I came back to make them pay everything back, with interest.

There are no ghosts in Chang'an, only the human heart.