Crossing the River of Sorrow

Note: The protagonist transmigrates to the year 1632, so the first four volumes chronicle his growth. If you want to read about Lin Pianpian, start with Volume Four.

Gu Changning wakes up one day to find that he's transmigrated into late-Ming Yangzhou.

Other transmigrators arrive with a System and a warehouse. He has nothing but a soaked T-shirt and half a fluorescent sneaker. Dockworkers earn fifteen copper coins a day. He crouches at a steamed-bread stall, chewing on a three-coin bun, then uses his knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping to earn his first silver at a cloth shop. From a crowded inn room to the salt merchants' guild, from the Liujianju teahouse to the Embroidered Uniform Guard's thousand-household office, he carves out a place in the late-Ming marketplace with modern accounting. The four great salt merchants call him “Master Gu,” a professor at the prefectural school owes him a favor, and a thousand-household commander in the Embroidered Uniform Guard allies with him to bring down a corrupt official.

He does all this for just one reason.

In the thirteenth year of Chongzhen's reign, a girl named Lin Hui'er will be sold into a brothel by her birth mother and renamed Lin Pianpian. Before that day comes, he must gather enough bargaining power to buy her freedom in this city on the brink of collapse.

For one person, he schemes to save a city.