Roots of the Poison Tree

In the second year of the Dali reign of Tang China, a young clerk from Jingzhao Prefecture is sent to a remote mountain village to investigate a tenancy dispute. He uncovers a primitive ancestral court that has silently executed every outsider who dared intervene. As he fights to survive, he traces the origins of the village's twisted justice back to a childhood soaked in blood, and witnesses how decades of collective indifference allowed a seed of evil to blossom into a law of the soil.