The Great Agricultural Minister of Guangwu

Lin Ze, a twenty-first-century overworked corporate accountant, wakes up transmigrated to a remote mountain forest at the end of the Xin dynasty. Half-starved, he is rescued with half a piece of hard wheat bread by Liu Boji, the eldest daughter of the powerful Liu clan in Nanyang. To earn his keep, he puts his modern accounting skills to work, using Arabic numerals and double-entry bookkeeping to sort out the Liu family’s years of tangled accounts for its ten thousand mu of fertile fields. The shrewd family head then forces him into a marriage, making him the Liu family’s live-in son-in-law. He learns that his brother-in-law is called Liu Xiu, the legendary “Chosen One” who supposedly used a meteorite to crush a million-strong army. Lin Ze is ecstatic: with a powerful backer like that, this rebellion is as good as won! Until... There are no meteorites. No miracles. Lin Ze finally understands that no golden finger will ever fall from the heavens. He casts aside his fantasies of getting ahead and clutches his abacus as he swears an oath: To hell with the course of history. He will use these accounts to protect the few loved ones he has left. From Nanyang to Hebei, from piles of corpses to the imperial court, he uses a single abacus to secure eight thousand suits of heavy armor for Liu Xiu and balance the supplies for a million troops. When he finally becomes Deputy Grand Minister of Agriculture and the Han dynasty’s “accountant,” he discovers that the greatest danger lies not on the battlefield, but among the “one of us” who fought alongside Liu Xiu to conquer the realm. Powerful families and meritorious officials are grabbing land and concealing people on a massive scale. The old comrades who once chewed Guanyin clay alongside him are now sucking the imperial treasury dry. This is not a power fantasy about a transmigrator crushing the ancients with modern knowledge. It is the story of a small man in a cannibalistic age of chaos, using an abacus to hold on to the last scraps of human kindness and principle.