Apocalypse: All Under Heaven

I transmigrated as the carpenter emperor Zhu Youxiao, armed with nothing but a copy of Accounting Standards. When the mess of a ledger lay before me, with Liaodong fallen, the treasury empty, and officials lining their pockets, I smiled. This Ming dynasty needed a full audit. I had Wei Zhongxian sign a performance contract, turning the Ninth Thousand Years into a model worker chasing down stolen wealth. I gave Xu Guangqi a three-dimensional view of history, making the emperor's merits and failings subject to public ratings, too. I established “raising dragons in the wilderness” for the princes: by eighteen, they had to go down to the grassroots and conduct audits. I drew up a balance sheet for civilization, tallying the gains and losses of five thousand years of Chinese history. From then on, every campaign began with a cost analysis, and the dead had to be depreciated. Salt taxes used progressive rates, and grain transport ran on steamships. From the Forbidden City to Oxford's classrooms, the whole world studied my double-entry bookkeeping. When they said I had conquered the world with an abacus, I was pointing at the stars: “Next, I'll prepare consolidated financial statements for the Milky Way.” Others ruled as emperors through political intrigue. He would rule by the books! With double-entry bookkeeping in one hand, he audited the wealth and grain of the realm. With a fiscal theory that united Heaven and humanity in the other, he drew on the wisdom of the Three Teachings and a hundred schools of thought to set national policy. He divided the four frontiers and ranked their peoples as Huaxia, Zhuxia, Fanxia, and foreign barbarians, clarifying rewards and punishments and establishing order. He secured the land, fought the Later Jin head-on, and used an iron fist to rein in the imperial clans and nobility. He expanded maritime power, abolished indirect rule, and resettled Taiwan, Luzon, and Australia, bringing ten thousand miles of coastline into Ming territory! The Donglin faction? Audit them and confiscate their estates! Jin merchants smuggling goods? Stop them cold with tariffs! The Later Jin running rampant? Sustain the war with the spoils of war! In this life, he would make the clatter of the abacus echo across the world, use accounting to revitalize the Ming, and forge a glorious age where all the people of Zhuxia prospered together and every nation came to pay tribute!