The hemp rope was inserted into his Adam's apple, and his toes were two inches off the ground.
The poor mathematician "Pork Shen" was hung from a beam with only one thought in his mind: He counted 16,300 acres of hidden fields, which was the fate of Shangyuan County and the fate of the Ming Dynasty.
If he dies, those numbers will rot in the ground.
He does not settle accounts, he calculates the fate of the country.
In the ninth year of Wanli, Zhang Juzheng had nine months left. The examination method, the giant network that assesses officials all over the world and sustains the life of the national treasury, is about to be torn into pieces by the bureaucracy.
And he, a book-calculator who couldn't even afford lamp oil, only had an abacus and a "Thousand-Character Classic".
Three sentences, three people, three fates:
"If the accounts are calculated incorrectly, a person will be killed; if the accounts are correct, a yamen will be killed." - He said to the county magistrate in the courtroom.
"I leave this knife to you." Zhang Juzheng said to him before the sickbed.
"Sir, the fire is still there." - At the foot of Qingliang Mountain, his students wrote for him.
Nine months later, Zhang Juzheng died of illness, the imperial examination law was abolished, and liquidation began.
He became the only person in the center of the storm who let the numbers speak for themselves.
What he is calculating is not the score, but Ming's fate.
The moment the abacus was dialed, the sky in Ming Dynasty's officialdom began to collapse.
