When Lu Yan, a wage slave grinding through 996 overtime, got himself “sent” to the woodshed of the Marquis of Yongning’s mansion in the Great Jing dynasty because of an eighth revision to a proposal and an unfinished spicy chicken drumstick, he stared at his hands, stained with black mud, and could only give Heaven the finger. “So I worked myself to death just to come to ancient times and pick up a 997 shift?”
From the start, he was at the very bottom of the marquis’s household food chain: whipped by the steward and deprived of his steamed buns by the second young master. Anyone else would have cried, but who was Lu Yan? He was the kind of hard case who could argue with a client about “the logical consistency of the eighth draft.”
He translated “You dare hit me?” into “Has your department overstepped the boundaries of its authority?” and reframed “compensate me for the damp firewood” as “This is a supply-chain issue. Take it up with procurement.” A few lines of workplace jargon were enough to leave the arrogant second young master so flustered he nearly bit the copper handle of the brazier.
He used the skills he’d picked up camping to knead coarse flour into “woodshed pancakes,” earning a stream of pork cracklings from the kitchen aunties. He mixed plant ash with lard to make “marquis-mansion-exclusive soap,” washing the ladies’ handkerchiefs until they gleamed. Even the marquise secretly sent someone to ask for some. He even used Excel’s “sort and subtotal” logic to solve the age-old mystery of “where did the monthly allowance go?” for the household accountant, and “accidentally” dropped the account book showing his stepmother’s embezzlement onto the marquis’s tea table.
From a lowly woodshed servant to the “thorn in everyone’s side whom no one at the marquis’s mansion dares provoke,” he used a wage slave’s blame-shifting tricks to dismantle domestic power struggles and his slacking-off skills to evade schemes. He stirred up the battles between legitimate and illegitimate heirs and the embezzlement in the inner household until it was just like his old work chat: 99+ unread messages, and no one knew who would get exposed next.
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