The Quill and the Blade

The Quill and the Blade is a historical web novel by Mu Yi, serialized on Qidian and completed in 2014; the full text runs about 947,000 characters (some platforms list about 815,000, owing to differences in edition and counting). Set in the third year of the Yonghui era of Emperor Gaozong of Tang (some sources say simply the Yonghui years): Xiao Jiading, a graduate student in legal history who has passed the judicial examination and worked as a lawyer, unexpectedly travels back in time to Yizhou in Jiannan Dao. Starting as a menial clerk and scribe in the penal office of Shaocheng County, he relies on his familiarity with the Tang Code, the Yonghui Code and other Tang statutes and on a modern lawyer's logical thinking to draft petitions, examine corpses and wounds, and take part in prisoner reviews and courtroom investigations, becoming embroiled in a series of difficult cases—among them "a child born during mourning," "a nun who kills her mother-in-law" and "a serial rape-murder." The novel takes the real judicial institutions and grassroots criminal procedures of the early Tang as its skeleton, depicting a judicial ecology knotted with aristocratic clans, muddled petty officials and powerful families meddling in government, and portraying the protagonist's tempering between the ideal of "using the law as a blade" and "using the pen to judge right and wrong" and the realities of officialdom. The prose is classical and concise, interspersed with Tang poetry and street-level sketches, combining case-solving deduction with the manners and life of the high Tang. The title comes from the line "let those who can read quietly seize the power of the pen and blade"; the protagonist wields exactly the pen of a written judgment to distinguish right from wrong between the letter of the law and human feeling.