The upright official Shen Hanzhi of the Great Ming worked himself to death in office, but his soul lingered.
He had lived an incorruptible life, yet only at the end did he realize the bitter truth: without pulling strings or paying bribes, you would never get ahead; the more you networked and paid, the higher you climbed and the more you could get done.
When he opened his eyes again, it was 1992, and he had become the son of a small hardware store owner, freshly dumped by his gold-digging girlfriend.
Glancing at the banner on the wall that read “Civil Service Exam,” he smiled.
In this life, he would draw on four hundred years of wisdom about officialdom and take another shot at a career in government.
He would figure out how power should be wielded in this brand-new era to truly benefit the people.
From the civil service exam essay hall to the turbulent world of grassroots government, an ultimate experiment in the art of governance, spanning time and space, begins.
