Lin Yan was swept into the whirlpool of commerce after his family was destroyed. He had a mind that could reckon with every account under heaven, yet in the mire he clutched an abacus, determined to change his fate. When the Wang family used counterfeit silver to trick him into signing a contract and seize his rice shop, he used the help of Shen Zhiyi, the Shen family’s legitimate daughter, to expose the loopholes in their books. Amid the rain, he used an abacus cord to bind the powerful men’s scheme. When a smuggling case at the docks revealed a hidden outpost of the Shanhai Alliance, he used mental arithmetic to crack its secret accounts, turning the click of his abacus beads into a blade that pierced the fog of the business world. He is a “poor wretch” ground into the mud, yet also the “living abacus” who strikes fear into the Jiangnan business alliance. He uses the nine-nine division method to expose counterfeit silver schemes and secret ledgers to bring down the smuggling network. He even turns his “abacus beads” into a key that knocks on the doors of both officialdom and commerce. From a little abacus in the streets and alleys to the grand affairs of grain transport, salt, and iron, he advances step by step without ever forgetting his original purpose. The blisters on his palms are the price of calculating the human heart; the clarity between his brows, untainted by greed, is a measure of business ethics worth more than gold. When the fragrance of jasmine from the Shen family’s legitimate daughter mingles with the scent of ink on the ledgers, and the iron token of the Shanhai Alliance meets the “Secrets of the Way of Commerce” left behind by his mother, Lin Yan finally understands that the most ingenious calculations in the world have never been a game of numbers. They are about calculating the gaps in the powerful men’s greed, keeping the scales of conscience level for the poor, and making those who once trampled him into the dust hear the name “Lin Yan” ring through the long streets of the business world like abacus beads striking the ground. The way of commerce is a game of chess, each move calculating a thousand waves; the human heart is a set of scales, weighing ten thousand mountains. Armed with an old abacus, a young man of humble origins carves out a path from poverty to nobility in an ancient world of commerce entangled with power and profit. You think he’s calculating money? No, he’s calculating the justice this world ought to have.
