Lin Peng, who had repeatedly failed in the public examination for ten years, fell asleep in the middle of the night in 2023. When he opened his eyes again, it was the Jingyou period of the Northern Song Dynasty - he became "Lin Peng", a scholar from a poor family in Hangzhou, facing the decline of his family and the upcoming county examination. When modern application thinking collided with policy theory in the Song Dynasty, he shocked the examiners' cognition with the "fish scale album verification method". In the imperial examination room where "names were transcribed", he used SWOT analysis to deconstruct people's livelihood problems. Starting from sixth place in the county examination, he embarked on a counterattack path intertwined with ancient and modern wisdom.
In the examination room, he saw through the fraud of subordinate officials and used the "household registration graded taxation" to solve the tax problem; he was "caught as son-in-law" by the prime minister's daughter at the bottom of the ranking, and a marriage between the two with a pen as a matchmaker brought him into the center of the court. From the magistrate of Wu County to the magistrate of Sansidu Branch, he implemented the "Baojia Accounting System" to investigate corruption, used "relief for work" to fight famine, and was the first to mention the "closed loop of the chain of evidence" when redressing an unjust case in Jiangning Prefecture. Faced with the "three redundancies" dilemma in the Northern Song Dynasty, he created the "official evaluation system" and the "Xiang Army Farming Law", but was impeached for disturbing the powerful.
When Wang Anshi set off a reform storm, as a "centrist" he not only praised the "Green Seedlings Law" for benefiting the people, but also urged "not to implement harsh government". In the whirlpool of Renzong's benevolence, Shenzong's determination and the old and new parties, he looked for a balance of "pragmatic change". From being a scholar in the county examination to being an official under Tong Zhongshu, he did not change the direction of history, but used modern logic to improve the imperial examination, taxation, and judiciary, leaving a footnote in the history books that "brings together the changes of ancient and modern times." The so-called counterattack is never about speculating on fate, but using every step of choice to practice his original intention of "ruling the world with what he has learned" within the limitations of the times.
