Feathers of a Dark Audit

In the neon-glazed sprawl of a hyper-surveilled Chinese megacity, a low-level audit clerk stumbles upon an ancient anomaly in the national treasury’s ledgers—a ghost entry that echoes the Spring and Autumn cockfight between Ji Pingzi and Hou Zhaobo. As he races to smuggle the evidence across borders, hunted by state assassins and betrayed by those he trusts, he discovers that every camera and algorithm can track his body, but no system can penetrate the primitive, chaotic darkness inside the human heart—where ambition, loyalty, and fear still duel like plumed birds. A Carrière-esque blend of psychological excavation and true-crime scaffolding, the novel dissects a modern corruption vortex while a parallel narrative exhumes the 517 BC case, asking whether power’s deepest transactions ever really leave a trace.