A famous Manchu general calls on Josei to aid him because he has been receiving death threats from a mysterious assailant, a skilful archer who can shoot at a tiny cup and hit it at two hundred paces. He says he knows who his enemy is, a man who deserted during a northern campaign called Hibaku Eika. Josei angrily says he will investigate, but he knows Eika is innocent. Eika is the friend who taught him the martial arts.

The Manchu general is indeed found murdered, his head beaten in by the kind of Mongol weapon that Hibaku carries at his waist. Hibaku admits that it was he who had been threatening the general, because of the man's crimes during that northern campaign. But he denies killing him. Josei is torn between his friendship for Eika and his duty to his office. A romantic Chinese hero cannot find himself in a happier situation than that. Duty! Honour! Love! and the possibility of executing your closest friend! Be still, my trembling heart.

And here we have the first meeting between Josei and his lecherous but gorgeous superior the Imperial Inspector Shukujin. Love at first sight, but only on Shukujin's side. Shukujin is conceited, importunate and ill-timed in his advances, and more interested in pretty faces than in the state of the province's rice supply. All of these are doubtless drawbacks in an official but forgivable in a manga hero who looks like Iwasaki Youko's famous Abe no Seimei. (Oh, and his real name is something undistinguished like Tou Shoushi. He generally goes by his nickname- Shukujin, graceful person- which shocks Josei to the tips of his very proper toes.)

Luckily Shukujin has a competent and retiring assistant, Kisuu, to handle all the details for him- and to drop hints that all Beijing knows that Josei is the Emperor's mignon, and that making too open a play for him might cost Shukujin his job or his head or both. Kisuu was a candidate for the imperial exams but failed his first attempt. His father died shortly thereafter and he was forced to end his studies and take the lower-ranked assistant's job to support his family. At that time he went to see the chrysanthemums at a famous temple only to find it closed for the day to allow the famous Kou Josei to view the flowers and compose poetry. Kisuu entered by a side gate and deliberately plucked a flower for himself. The guards were about to arrest him, but Josei covered for him. But when they meet now, Josei seems not to recognize him.

The province is suffering a famine, and rice has to be brought in, but when it arrives the rice is half chaff. Josei starts to investigate the trail of bureaucratic corruption that caused this, but finds Kisuu is ahead of him. And then tragedy strikes. Backgrounding this story about Shukujin's infatuation and the local magistrates' venality is the melancholy theme of Kishuu and his complicated feelings towards Josei, the golden successful man that Kishuu will never be.

The adopted son of a good family is expected to marry the family's single daughter, Suiran. But a chance meeting with her nurse's daughter causes the young man to fall passionately in love and ask to have his engagement broken. He marries this girl from a poor family and leaves his foster parents' house. His former fiancée Suiran seems resigned and indifferent.

While all this has been happening, her family have had a guest- Shou, Josei's incorrigible young friend, who ran away while being taken off to boarding school and managed to break his leg stealing fruit from the family's trees. Some time later the young man comes back to ask his former fiancée's help. His wife is sick, and Suiran asks her father's permission to let him bring her home to be nursed. The couple come to stay, just as Josei comes to collect his wayward charge. And so Josei is on the scene when murder happens.