In the first year of Jinghe, the Great Zhou Dynasty was rotten to the core: land was concealed, military pay was a black hole, aristocratic families controlled the government, and Beidi invaded the south every year. Shen Yanci, who traveled through time and became an eighth-rank official in the Hanlin Academy, calculated a national account in his old files that was enough to wipe out his reputation, and was forced to leave the capital to investigate the border troops; One believed in numbers, the other believed in blades. They should have disliked each other, but in a border war, they discovered that each other was the person the other needed most to survive and change the world.
From investigating military pay, clearing grievances, and reforming the imperial examination system, to the Jiangnan epidemic, feudal lords' rebellion, military reform, and the new land policy, the two men used both literature and force to drag the court, frontier troops, public opinion, and finance into the reform battlefield. Shen Yanci uses the account books to tear up the family's monopoly, and Xie Jingchen uses the new army to chop up the inertia of the old system; they will win, they will turn the tables, they will fight hard in the court and on the battlefield, and they will pay the price of blood, life, guilt and suspicion for every victory.
But the real difficulty is never the external enemy, but the fact that great achievements shock the master, people's hearts are hard to calculate, and reforms will hurt others. When the young emperor grows up, the old party counterattacks, and the world is full of curses, can these two people who pulled the dynasty out of the mire still make it to the end together? When the dust settles and the inkstone is still wet, are they changing the system of a generation, or the way the entire world views people?
Concept: Two incomplete people spent fifteen years pulling the rotten dynasty out of the mud pit and turning each other into more complete people.