"This country is like rotten meat pickled in a jar of sour bamboo shoots, and you and I are the maggots that eat it."
In the third year of Xianping's reign, Zhao Youdun, a young man from Qiongzhou, clutched half a jar of rotten pickled bamboo shoots and received the blood-stained edict of succession. Ten years ago, there was a fire in the East Palace, and the five princes who "conspired to rebel" were burned to death, leaving only him, the son of a maid, to be exiled to the end of the world. What the Imperial City of Bianjing handed over was not a crown, but a poison-quenching shackle - what Empress Dowager Wen, who listened behind the curtain, wanted was a puppet who could bear all the infamy for her.
Lin Qitong, the censor of a poor family, was blood-spattered on the jade steps at the enthronement ceremony. What he presented was not auspiciousness, but private and ironclad evidence soaked in secret texts of the Liao Kingdom. The brand mark on the side of his neck was not healed, and the whip marks on his back were still there, but he dared to open the most painful sore in the Song Dynasty in front of the royal family: "If your Majesty wants to be a benevolent king, you must first learn to drink poison to quench your thirst."
The firelight of the salt field illuminates not only the secret account of Xie's collaboration with the enemy, but also the amazing bloodline hidden under the dragon robe; what is traded in the cabin of the Liao merchant ship is not only war horses and crossbows, but also a game of "Dragon Slaying Chess" that spans twenty years. When the jade ring buried at the bottom of the sour bamboo shoot jar comes to light again, when the strategy carved on the coral reef turns into flames of war, and the crackle of emerald rosary beads is heard from behind the curtain in the deep palace——
"If the Ai family can help you get on the dragon throne, they can build you into the wall of the Ancestral Temple!"
In this chess game with mountains and rivers as the scales and bones and blood as the sons, some people used carved melons and carved characters to deliver reminders, while others used calculation codes to write regicide plans. And when the wolf flag of the Liao Kingdom was planted on the city wall of Youzhou, Zhao Youdun finally tore into pieces the Twelve Chapter Patterns' uniform and stuffed the Jade Seal of the Kingdom into Lin Qitong's blood-stained palm:
"The peaceful and prosperous age you want needs to be sacrificed with your and my shame."
"We are all pickling our consciences - you are doing it for hatred, I am doing it for delusion, and this Song Dynasty... Is doing it to create a ridiculous peace in the rot."
Purpose: Clean up the government and the public