In the winter of 1620, the body of a hundred-household officer of the Embroidered Uniform Guard was found floating on the Tonghui River. Clutched in his arms was a blood-soaked copy of the Treatise on Worrying About the Nation. What seemed like an ordinary murder would tear apart the Ming dynasty's last illusion of peace.
Shen Mo, a junior officer, was ordered to investigate. Beside the body, he found a token belonging to the Qi family army and a poem slip from the Donglin Party, two pieces of evidence that should never have appeared together. As the investigation deepened, a shocking conspiracy spanning twenty years gradually came to light: from Zhang Juzheng's secret reform documents to the theft of weapons from the Three Great Garrisons, from a revenge list belonging to the remnants of the wokou pirates to the Jurchen infiltration network beyond the frontier.
On a pleasure boat on the Qinhuai River, the celebrated courtesan Liu Rushi gently brushed the strings of her qin. Her true identity was the White Lotus sect's Holy Maiden, and she controlled an underground intelligence network linking the court and the common people. Meanwhile, amid the raging seas of the Zhoushan Islands, the one-armed swordsman Qi Yuan led the remnants of the wokou pirates in search of the lost Mandarin Duck Formation diagram of the Qi family army. He had no idea that the blood feud he carried was closely connected to the murder case in the capital.
When the flames of a warning beacon announced that Shenyang was under threat, these three intertwined souls would face their ultimate showdown in the snowstorms of Liaodong. Could the Embroidered Uniform Guard's embroidered spring sabers, the legacy of the Qi family army, and the White Lotus sect's secret arts build a final line of defense against the tide of the Eight Banners' cavalry and save the crumbling dynasty?
