In the autumn of Yongchang Year Twelve, the examination results were posted, and Zhou Wenhuan failed for the fifth time.
From a modern police officer who died suddenly at the household registration office to a destitute, impoverished scholar, he accepted his lot. His elderly parents were growing old, and his four younger sisters were still waiting to be married. He tore up the Confucian classics and took an inconspicuous clerical job at the county yamen instead.
Everyone laughed. He had given up the proper path to a prestigious official degree just to become a low-ranking legal clerk. His life was ruined.
Yet in his hands, dusty case files became warrants of death, and he pieced together the faintest clues from old, unsolved cases.
In the case of a headless female corpse, he exposed a human-trafficking ring by examining the ink on household registers. In a series of burglaries, he identified a habitual thief's injured left foot from his footprints. In an imperial examination scandal involving powerful factions, he saw through layer upon layer of disguise by reading microexpressions.
While his former classmates were still studying themselves gray-haired in pursuit of official rank, Zhou Wenhuan had the household registers of the realm in his hands and controlled the administration of criminal justice.
The world sighed: A fallen scholar joins the yamen as a lowly clerk, who could have guessed his pen would stir up such a storm?
This is the story of a modern household registration officer who uses case files and logic to climb step by step to the pinnacle of power in ancient times.
This story is set in a wholly fictional world.
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