The Long Wind of Currency

Money is like a long wind, sweeping across the Nine Provinces, through marketplaces and city streets, over seas and across borders.

The wind itself knows no good or evil. It turns the gears in factories, carries the bustle of life through alleyways, and lifts a city's fortunes or drags them down. Without warning, it can also shatter the foundations countless ordinary people depend on.

People are used to gazing up at the prosperity the wind brings, convinced that figures on paper and stamped documents must be the truth. They do not realize that undercurrents lie dormant in the gaps between ledger entries, and that nets are woven through the flow of accounts. Greed slips along with the wind, hiding behind sham transactions and layers of shell companies. Every transfer is a disguise, every contract a smokescreen.

Before the storm arrives, the traces of crime are invisible, and everything seems flawless.

Those who pore over the records in search of clues never intended to fight the wind, yet for a long time they have been trapped between two difficult choices. If they insist on digging deeper and tearing away layer after layer of disguise, the truth coming to light may trigger a chain reaction that drags innocent businesses and ordinary people into the fallout. If they delay the investigation, they let the polluted current keep spreading. Once the storm has gathered strength, it will unleash an even greater collapse. There is no perfect solution, and no way to avoid paying a price.

The clues lie hidden among millions of silent transactions. There is no murder weapon, no trace of blood, only the secret testimony left behind by numbers. They bury themselves in mountains of supporting documents, trace fleeting threads through a vast sea of records, and distinguish truth from falsehood amid the competing interests of many parties. Their opponents have already laid a series of intricate traps. Every step of the investigation could lead them straight into one.