In the fifth year of the Apocalypse, the war in Liaodong has not yet been extinguished, and the Ming Dynasty is already in turmoil.
Gu Yanzhou woke up and became a down-and-out scholar in Huang County, Dengzhou Prefecture. The family is suffering from a sick mother, and creditors are pressing for the door. If the money is not paid within three days, the ancestral land will fall into the hands of powerful men.
But he soon discovered that behind this small IOU, there was actually a bad payment debt.
Military rations were despoiled, firearms were in disrepair, frontier troops were left without vacancies, and factions in the court were fighting endlessly. The Hou Jin Dynasty looked outside the pass, Chongzhen had not yet ascended the throne, and the defeat of the Ming Dynasty seemed to be a foregone conclusion.
But Gu Yanzhou didn't believe in fate.
He used the account books as a knife to investigate corrupt officials and defeat the powerful; he used Denglai as a base to train the new army and make firearms; he used the Liaohai Sea as a bureau to connect with the Dongjiang River to control the Hou Jin. Dong Lin, the eunuchs, the generals, the emperor, everyone wanted to use him as a chess piece, but he turned himself into the chess player step by step.
A scholar who started out as an IOU from a broken house.
A few years later, he would bring peace to the Liaohai Sea, restore stability to the northern frontier, and let this declining dynasty hear the sound of mountains and rivers again.
