A Thousand Miles Journey

In the first year of Qianyou, the Five Dynasties were in chaos, with mountains and rivers in ruins and officialdom in depression. Pei Lin, a young official in Taiyuan, was ordered to escort the case files south. When he was leaving the city, he met a man surnamed Zhao who was walking alone with a stick, and a frightened woman named Jingniang who wanted to return to Puzhou. There was no way to lead the two of them, and their origins were unclear; but Pei Lin covered them up during the interrogation at the city gate, and the three of them joined forces and embarked on a thousand-mile journey south. Along the way, they passed through deserted villages, dilapidated temples, broken inns, ferries, private roads and black shops. They saw hungry people everywhere, saw officials and bandits sharing the same evil, saw rioters eating the people, and also saw humble people who still had some good thoughts in desperate situations. Pei Lin, who was a bookish little official, gradually saw clearly the distance between the laws on paper and the suffering in the world; the man named Zhao understood that although loyalty in the Jianghu could save one person for a while, it could not save the world from chaos; Jing Niang, on her way back home, wrote down the sufferings that no one could remember in her heart one by one. This is not a heroic legend, but a ruthless journey on officialdom in troubled times. We meet each other thousands of miles away, and everyone has his destination; what people see in the human heart is all on the way.