Commensal

Shen Anji failed to start a business three times. He was poisoned by carbon monoxide late at night after burning his account books. When he woke up, he found himself kneeling on the cold blue bricks of the Shen family ancestral hall in the Ming Dynasty. The knees are bleeding, the sandalwood is pungent to the nose, and there are many memorial tablets. The Shen family was a prominent business and gentry family in the south of the Yangtze River. Their aunt, the Wang family, was in charge of the accounts of more than a dozen shops, but for twenty years she never found out that the accountants had made three false accounts. Shen Anji saw through it - loopholes are not the problem, the problem is "no one checks". She started from the inner house and formed the "Kunce Small Cooperative" with the second sister who embroidered, the fourth sister who dyed cloth, and the widowed sister-in-law who ran goods, replacing scattered survival with joint-stock operations. But when her alliance expanded from the family to the capital, and when her account books began to touch the interests of the salt administration, tax deeds, and Liaodong Horse Market, she found that two nets had been waiting there - one was the enlightenment and farewell left by the guide who signed the name "Wild", and the other was the power and loneliness laid by the emperor Ying Ce, who had the pseudonym "Ying's Company". There are two men in her life. One taught her to see through the essence, but when she went too far, he left eight words: "rivers don't flow, and mountains don't hinder each other." One was born above ten thousand people, but took off his dragon robe in front of her, revealing an arrow wound on his back from "one of his own". He handed her a blank jade sign: "I will forget everyone except you in this life, and I don't want to forget it." She was not trying to subvert the imperial power, but to get the imperial power to recognize that women could own property, inherit the family business, and define their own identity. Intention: When the rules are made by others, you can only be a "resource"; when you participate in making the rules, you become a "person". This book uses Shen Anji's climb from the inner house to the court to explore a core proposition: behind all structural problems, the real liberation is not to "do better than men", but to allow women to become co-makers of rules. The story does not pursue a power reversal like "the heroine ascends the throne", but points to a more realistic ideal - to allow the law to recognize women's property rights, inheritance rights, business rights and title autonomy. This is altruism and the highest form of self-interest.