The Record of Canonical Selections

In the chaotic era of the Sixteen Kingdoms, every life has a price. In 384 AD, Chen Ji, a ninth-rank registrar in the Records Office of Ye City, handles “blood ink” every day, assessing the remaining labor value of displaced people and captured soldiers in the “Register of Forced Labor” and deciding their fates with every stroke. Then, among the names of three hundred children, he sees a gaze that should not be there: the gaze of a human being. He begins by altering the records to save one person, then uses ledgers to shape the fate of the realm. After burning down the Records Office, Chen Ji heads north to the Taihang Mountains with the secret ledgers and the “Granary Map.” Using Hanging Grain Fortress as his base, he launches an unprecedented “economic war”: wielding the prices of salt, iron, and grain as blades, and public accounts as shields, he maneuvers between warlords such as Murong Chui and Tuoba Gui. He brings clerks together to form the Ledger Scholars’ Guild and implements new policies to “abolish death contracts and establish living labor.” Yet his greatest enemy is not on the battlefield. As the realm nears unification, he faces the ultimate question: what should be done with a past that treated people as “consumable resources”? Rather than judging by the ledgers, he builds the Silent Hall among the ruins and carves into it the numbers of 127,000 nameless people. This age of chaos once turned human beings into cold figures on a page. Chen Ji spends his whole life trying to turn those figures back into people.