A modern soul time-travels to Great Zhou, becoming Gu Chang'an, the son of the powerful chancellor Gu Mingyuan. His father rules with an iron fist and suppresses the aristocratic families, being denounced by scholars across the land as a traitorous minister who ruins the country, while the original body owner is notorious in the capital as a dissolute prodigal son. At first, Gu Chang'an only wanted to lie flat and enjoy wealth, but after witnessing the military families implicated by his father executed to the last man, he suddenly realized that under the peak of the Gu family's power crisis lurked everywhere, and once they fell, he would not escape reckoning. He washed away his prodigal habits, buried himself in studying, broke through all obstacles all the way from the county examination top scholar, and entered officialdom through the regular imperial examination route. Navigating between the hostility of civil officials and the imperial princes' struggle for the succession in the court vortex, he also gradually came to understand the patriotic intentions behind his father's ruthless methods.