In the seventeenth year of the Jinghe era, in Great Yin.
Su Jin is a menial disciple in charge of the grain and provisions accounts at Wuding Mountain's outer sect. He's seventeen and knows no martial arts at all. He started later than anyone. All he has is a method of calculation left by his father, who worked for the Bureau of Revenue: by studying grain prices, horse administration, and shipping volumes, he can deduce how many troops the enemy has and when war will begin.
His father died because of this very method. After uncovering a shortfall in the Wujin accounts, his entire family of seven was slaughtered. He was the only one someone pulled from a ditch.
Wujin and darksteel: the real money of this world. Neither armor nor crossbows can be made, nor bodies tempered, without them. The official price is thirty taels per jin; on the black market, it's one hundred and twenty, rising to two hundred and forty in wartime. Every plot, betrayal, and war of the past three hundred years can ultimately be reduced to this price difference.
Starting with the salt smugglers of Huaizhou, Su Jin calculates his way through river gangs, outlaws, powerful clans, and princes, all the way to the imperial court in Bianjing. He has saved cities and lost them. He has predicted every move his enemies would make, but cannot predict when the people beside him will die.
Only at the end does he understand: he can balance every account in the world, except for one thing: what are the people who died along the way worth?
Looking back at the accountant's writings, he deduced the worldly affairs outside the account through the accounts and accounting links. Based on the accounts, he started as a humble servant at the outer door, and slowly climbed up the black ship selling salt in Wuding Mountain. He also traced a secret hidden in it. At the beginning, he buried the clues to his life experience. Through the account book, he could get a glimpse of the corrupt world. The author's writing is concise, clever in conception, and logically rigorous. It only starts with the male protagonist's trivial matters and accounting, and gradually unfolds the story, which is interlocking and not boring. Highly recommended for those who want to read stories. Those who want to see the love, hate and hatred between men and women have not appeared yet.
It looks like a book written by an old writer.