The Xiping Granary submitted a memorial nearly three thousand characters long, all to request the purchase of three hundred sacks.
After reading it, Li Mingzhou, an eighth-rank clerk at the Tongzheng Institute, wrote just one sentence:
The sacks can wait. What they really want is for His Majesty not to inspect the granary for seven days.
When Emperor Xiao Chengzhao read that sentence, Li Mingzhou's quiet days came to an end.
Why was a granary clerk who had been dead for three years still signing this month's ledgers? Where had the extra 2,400 shi of grain on the books gone? And why did three grain shops all have the same price slip?
From then on, any three-thousand-character memorial that landed in Li Mingzhou's hands could be distilled into one plain sentence.
But he soon realized that official language wasn't all empty words. The real challenge was shortening a sentence without doing anyone an injustice.
This is a lighthearted alternate-history comedy about a low-ranking official who gets drawn into court politics by reading memorials, checking account books, and cutting through official jargon.
It was like a running story, and at first I thought it was something new, but later on the date it became more and more like a running story, and then it was all a robot-like conversation, saying that either you laugh or he laughs, and then everyone laughs together... I was so confused that I didn't know what I was looking at. The plot didn't advance at all for a long time. It was simply torture. I have no luck and I want to apologize to you all. I will withdraw first.
After reading three chapters, the intellectual flavor was too strong, and I was knocked down [covering my face] Good guy, three chapters! Those conversations back and forth made no progress at all in the specific plot. Awesome, really awesome
Great writing