A joyous opening:
Jiangling, the capital of the Yun Zhao Kingdom, an ancient city with a thousand years of history, blessed with abundant natural treasures and suffused with imperial majesty...
In the winter of the eighth year of the Kai Bao era of the Sheng Dynasty, as Sheng cavalry trampled through the gates of Jiangling, Shen Yan, deputy minister of the Yun Zhao Kingdom's Ministry of Revenue, set a raging inferno ablaze!
The ruler, Li Yun, surrendered in plain white robes, his hands bound. The moment he crossed the drawbridge, Shen Yan turned and rushed deep into the imperial palace.
He doused it with oil and set it alight! A hundred volumes of the Fish-Scale Land Registers curled and warped in the flames, revealing the secret salt and iron archives of a century of Yun Zhao history hidden in their linings!
Disguised as a salt merchant, he infiltrated the enemy dynasty. In public, he established a silk guild; in secret, he spun three vast webs:
Merchants: secret messages hidden in moldy tea cakes, counterfeit copper coins stirring up the markets, and sunken grain ships severing the realm's lifelines;
The literary network: traveling performers singing the lost melody of Leaving the River, woodblock prints spreading bloody verses about the fallen kingdom, and homesickness set ablaze by the writings of the
The protagonist uses business as his blade and weaves a huge web secretly...