I transmigrated into the Eastern Jin dynasty as a poor commoner, and from the start, someone tried to silence me. My uncle died in a rain-soaked night, murdered by the Langya Wang clan and the Qiao commandery Huan clan. Either one could crush me a hundred times over.
Xie An, who held power over the court, wanted to use me as a pawn. The tearful emperor’s favor concealed an attempt to use me as a weapon. The noble young ladies of the great clans hid calculation and weighing of benefits behind their fluttering hearts.
They laughed at me, a lowborn ant who knew nothing of the rules.
I laughed at them for sitting at the bottom of a well, having never seen the real world.
They wanted to play mind games with me? I come from an era where everyone can grind their way to the top.
They wanted to see who had fewer scruples? I cut off their salt and iron, changed their land system, and struck at the very roots of the great clans’ lifeblood.
When I turned the Northern Command into a “performance-driven vanguard” and used a book called The Ledger of Human Nature to calculate every rise and fall at court, they finally realized: the sickle I wielded was beyond their comprehension.
From the moment I arrived, the rules of this game had changed.
