The Ashes of Merit

In 1956, young military prosecutor Lu Chenyuan was selected to participate in the post-war trial of war criminals in Longyuan. A minor procedural misstep, driven by ambition, was exploited by a cabal of his superiors, including his mentor Ji Minghao, intelligence officer Wei Zhengxian, and department head Zuo Kun. They framed him as a spy conspiring with the accused, securing his life sentence. In 1996, Lu Chenyuan, now elderly and broken, is released on medical parole. Clinging to fragments of memory and a handful of smuggled trial notes, he begins a lonely quest to peel back the layers of a conspiracy that has calcified into the highest echelons of power. The story explores how catastrophic evil is born not from monstrous intent, but from a web of petty ambitions, cowardice, and the mundane desire to protect one's own position. It is a tale of belated justice, where the truth, once unearthed, reveals the terrifyingly ordinary face of systemic betrayal.