Lu Chenzhou, a modern-day Wall Street financier, is dropped into the Great Yong dynasty. The moment he opens his eyes, he finds himself saddled with a debt of two hundred thousand taels.
One hundred thousand taels are due that very day. Eight creditors show up to seize the family estate, his warehouses are taken, his engagement is called off, and only forty-seven taels remain in his accounts.
Everyone expects the Lu family to go bankrupt. Instead, Lu Chenzhou turns the tables: he not only recovers the family assets, but gets the creditors to lend him even more.
He burns defective goods, rebuilds the weaving workshops, introduces annual membership contracts, launches a price war, and swallows up his rivals' businesses...
In an age when capital faces no legal constraints, Lu Chenzhou uses debt restructuring and financial maneuvering to turn two hundred thousand taels of debt into two million, then twenty million. The more he owes, the bigger his business empire grows, and the less the world can afford to let him fall.
The great clans try to cut off his supply of silver, only to end up staking their ancestral estates and farmlands. The imperial court tries to crush him with its authority, only to discover that the treasury, military pay, and grain routes have all become dependent on the Lu family.
When a million Northern Yan troops march south, Lu Chenzhou commands not a single soldier. With nothing but grain contracts, warehouse receipts, and trade routes, he shorts the enemy's grain reserves and leaves their army starving before the battle even begins.
The emperor comes in person to the Lu estate to beg him to save the country. Lu Chenzhou simply lays a loan contract on the imperial desk.
“I can save the country, Your Majesty. Please stamp this first.”
From a bankrupt young master with two hundred thousand taels in debt to the world's biggest debtor, whom no one dares demand payment from.
In the end, the entire world becomes his debtor.
