Records of Unsolved Cases in the Late Ming Dynasty: the Embroidered Knife and the Ashes of Family and Country

The ten years of mildew in Chongzhen have soaked into every inch of bluestone in Yingtian Mansion. Former Jin Yiwei Qianhu Shen Yanzhi stepped in the mud, and the devalued waistband around his waist still carried the chill of Beizhen Fusi - three months ago, he was demoted to a promotion official for impeaching the remnants of the eunuch party, but on the first day he stepped into Jiangnan, he bumped into two corpses with embroidered spring knives stuck in them.​ The black and blue wound on the chest of the deceased concealed the lost "traction machine" poison, the forged Donglin Party secret message glowed strangely in the candlelight, and the black iron sand at the crime scene was exactly the same as the ore controlled by the Liaodong Army. When Su Ningmei, the daughter of a doctor, broke into the government office holding half a piece of blood-stained linen left by her father (the coroner), Shen Yanzhi was shocked to realize that this counterfeit embroidered spring knife not only wanted to kill people, but also split the pretense of the troubled times in the late Ming Dynasty.​ From the "ghost sails" on the boats on the Qinhuai River to the military pay that disappeared on the water transport ships, from the carefully crafted secret letters at the border beacon tower to the secret records of the palace in the Forbidden City, every case he solves is like opening a crack in the pillar of the dynasty that is about to collapse. The swords of the remnants of the Eunuch Party, the arrows made by Hou Jin, the beacon fire of the rebel army, and the calculations of the Donglin Party members were intertwined into a web in the bloody dawn of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen. The love between his children and Su Ningmei was just the most fragile thread in this web.​ When the beacon fire in Beijing reflected the night sky in the south of the Yangtze River, Shen Yanzhi finally read in the files of the last case: the so-called unsolved case was never the murderer's conspiracy, but the terminal illness of a dynasty that was rotten to the core. He can cut off the murderer's knife, but he cannot stop the ashes of the land called "home and country" under the wheel of history.