The First Clerk of the County Government

On the first day that Gu Wei'an entered the county government, the case manager asked him to fill in the old accounts using a dead man's handwriting. That dead man is his father. Three years ago, eight hundred stones of grain relief disappeared, and his father, a scribe, was convicted and died in prison. Three years later, in order to support his mother and sister, Gu Wei'an had to step into the place where his father died. When he imitated his father's handwriting and added a family to the old register, a widow suddenly broke into the county government office: her husband, who had been dead for six years, actually paid for the food every year. A false account, a farm cow that was taken away, and a fire that burned into the warehouse dragged Gu Wei'an into the depths of the county government office. The power here is not only in the court, but also in who writes, who copies, who keeps, and who seals. He has no official status and no authority to judge the case. He can only find the truth from contradictory field records, food stamps and confessions. But the more he investigated, the more he discovered that this case of a deceased person's payment of food was leading to the old debt that his father had not finished talking about.