The Cangwu Hunt

In the second year of Qin Er Shi, Cangwu Commandery festers under a silent terror. Discharged crossbowman Meng An returns to find his village gutted and his sister vanished, only to be abducted by masked riders and branded as quarry. He has entered the domain of the Jianzong Club—a secret fellowship of noble sons and corrupt magistrates who stalk the displaced and the deserter through the misted hills, secure in the knowledge that the law will deliberately turn its gaze away. Told through dry official inquests, field-dispatches, and visceral survival sequences in the manner of Gordon Burn's forensic gaze, the novel interrogates how an offence punishable by dismemberment in one decade becomes a mere peccadillo in the next, bending the moral spine of an empire.