Winter, the twenty-seventh year of Jiajing.
Zhu Mo, a distant member of the imperial clan descended from the Great Ancestor, was demoted to the status of a disgraced clansman over an old case and confined to an annex of the Imperial Clan Court in the southern city.
His clothes were tattered, his food rations skimmed, and the charcoal damp. The cold left his hands cracked and bleeding.
Even a low-ranking clerk could control whether he lived or died. One declaration of “death by illness” would be enough to bury him unnoticed in a mass grave.
As the lowliest member of the Ming imperial clan, he was beneath even the common people.
He had no System, no memories from transmigrating, no divine weapons, and no miraculous medical skills.
All he had was neat handwriting and half a battered copy of the Great Ming Code.
Surviving was his only thought.
From enduring indignities and currying favor with petty clerks, to seizing a thread of hope through an inspection roster;
from copying books for food, to getting a minor clerical job in the yamen;
from constantly watching others’ expressions and treading on thin ice, to maneuvering between the Yan faction and the reform-minded officials;
he never gambled on fate or hoped for a benefactor. He relied only on reading people, discerning their motives, and exploiting the system.
Every step cost blood. Every step was fraught with danger.
In the Ming bureaucracy, where people devoured one another, he rose from a disgraced clansman of humble origins to Grand Secretary with power over all under heaven.
This book has no golden finger, no mindless wish fulfillment, and no enemies who act like idiots.
A realistic tale of political maneuvering from start to finish, full of peril at every turn, and a hard-edged rise through the bureaucracy.
