The Happy Life of Niu Lai

In the final years of the Great Qian dynasty, a terrible drought drove people from their homes across the land. Luoniu City was the most desolate border fief in the entire kingdom. Its original lord was a dimwitted prince. Officials colluded to embezzle funds, the granaries were nearly empty, refugees were at death's door, bandits had cut off the roads, and the surrounding noble families were waiting to seize his land and swallow up his people. After his soul transmigrated, the prince remained a fool on the outside, but inside was now the mind of a modern fresh-food supply-chain expert. He began with a bowl of porridge and a ledger: assigning work points, auditing accounts, posting records publicly, and clarifying duties and responsibilities. Old officials wanted to embezzle? They would have to get past a double-entry audit. The noble families wanted to throw their weight around? They could bring it before a public assembly. He turned the idea of “human decency” into an ironclad rule no one dared defy. Chen Shi was the brains: a stern auditor who recorded every greedy impulse on the public notice board. Mulan was the brawn: a retired border-army commander who handled unrest with her blade and never interfered in governance. One set the rules, the other enforced them. Together, they guarded the two tracks, civil and military. The villains kept changing their tactics: today they tampered with the scales, tomorrow they falsified the accounts, and the day after they manipulated people's hearts. They would never be made stupid just to suit the plot. With nothing but rules, a dimwitted prince stubbornly turned a doomed, worthless city into the safest refuge in a chaotic age. A hard-core infrastructure-building novel focused on systems and institutions, with plenty of wish fulfillment. No heroine, no System, no fantasy elements. He survives the chaos and builds a happy life through rules alone.