Shocking Blade

In the autumn of the 40th year of Yongchang, a fire on Huaishu Street in Chang'an burned one hundred and thirty-seven people in the Cui Mansion to ashes. The palace of Cui Huaiyuan, the Crown Prince, was home to three generations of civil servants and disciples all over the world. They were all uprooted overnight. The imperial edict read: "Collaborating with the enemy and treason, everyone in the family will be executed." No one dared to ask why. When Zhao Huaien, a doctor in the Ministry of Punishment, was counting the roster, he added a line with his pen - "Cui Jingren, the eldest son of Cui, has an unrecognizable body and is presumed dead." The tip of the pen swayed slightly, and it couldn't be taken back. Thousands of miles away in Qingyang, a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, a man named Chen Wu came to Chunfeng Tower. His clothes were in rags, his face was sallow and his muscles were thin, and he only had three pennies in his pocket. He said he had fled the famine in the north. He made the fire, served the dishes, and wiped the table. His hands and feet were so agile that he didn't look like a novice. He chewed a bowl of rice for a long time, as if he couldn't bear to swallow it. The way he held the bowl was not what a beggar should have. When he fell asleep, he breathed so softly that it was almost inaudible. No one in Chunfeng Tower is real. The cook, Old Dingtou, didn't have the same knife skills as a cook, the girl delivering medicine walked with her feet first, and the abacus on Shopkeeper Wang's counter had been dialing for thirty years, and it was dialing slower than anyone else. And the guy named Chen Wu - he had a booklet taped to his arms, with four words written on the cover: Cui Family One Hundred and Thirty-Seven. Someone is checking. Someone is hiding. Someone was looking at the door of Chunfeng Tower in the dark, waiting for someone to walk in and never come out again. This is the secret of everyone in a small town, and a blood spread from Chang'an.