A young boy enters Chang'an City for the first time.
Pei Yun comes from a once-respectable but now fallen escort family in Guanzhong. His father disappeared outside Chang'an while escorting a shipment, leaving behind only a copper coin with a chipped edge and half of a damaged escort manifest. Carrying these two things, Pei Yun steps into Chang'an for the first time. That very day, street thugs known as the Rotten-Eye Gang rob him of every last coin, and a broker tricks him out of his identity papers. He ends up as the lowliest water carrier at a tavern in the West Market, unable even to leave the city. At first, his goals are modest: survive, find out whether his father is alive or dead, and deliver the shipment marked “never to be delivered” on the manifest to its destination. But the hidden pattern on the coin leads to a register of secret agents planted throughout Chang'an’s Thirty-Six Wards. His father was not escorting cargo at all, but a ledger capable of shaking the entire court. The conflicts escalate in stages: from a tavern laborer, Pei Yun is dragged into a turf war between the West Market merchants’ guild and the Canal Gang. He is forced to navigate the Rotten-Eye Gang, the Jingzhao Prefecture’s constables, and a mysterious swordsman who claims to have been his father’s old friend. He barely manages to establish himself with street smarts and a rough, untrained grasp of martial arts, only to discover that with every step he takes toward the truth, someone close to him dies. Midway through, he is forced to take over the remnants of his father’s network of secret agents, transforming from a nobody into a target for everyone. His former protectors turn against him one after another, and the secret lines running through Chang’an’s 108 wards are severed one by one. The final crisis comes when the truth in the ledger points straight to the real employer behind that fateful escort job: a powerful noble who, on the surface, has shown Pei Yun the greatest favor. That man has already laid his plans, intending to use the chaos of the Shangyuan Lantern Festival to purge everyone who knows the truth. Amidst a citywide curfew and a sea of flames, Pei Yun must decide whether to burn the ledger and buy himself a chance to live, or carry it to the city walls and make all of Chang’an pay for his father’s death.
