I'm the Ultimate Overworker in Great Xia, So No Slacking Off!

After working himself to the bone at a 996 job, Xu Xian transmigrates into the body of a poor scholar-official in ancient times. He planned to lie flat, but then discovered that this shabby government office was even more cutthroat than a major corporation. While his colleagues sipped tea and read the papers, he finished three years' worth of work in three days. Before he knew it, he'd become the most powerful official in the imperial court.

Xu Xian died. He was thirty-two, slumped over his desk, with his computer screen still glowing: [Project acceptance passed. Thank you for your hard work!]

When he opened his eyes again, he was a poor scholar-official in the Hanlin Academy of the Great Xia dynasty. No money, no home, no connections. On his very first day, his colleagues ganged up on him and dumped three years of old records on his desk. If he couldn't sort them out within a month, he was out.

His colleagues waited for him to cry.

Xu Xian smiled.

Three days later, he slapped the organized documents onto the desk and, while he was at it, exposed a major salt-tax scandal in Jiangnan from twenty years earlier. The court was in an uproar, the emperor was stunned, and his colleagues fell to their knees.

From then on, a legend arose in the Ming bureaucracy:

One man used [smart search] to investigate corruption. Another used [multithreaded processing] to draft memorials. And another used a [cross-department collaboration group] to force everyone into meetings. The upright officials called him a sorcerer who bewitched the emperor, so he fired back with a data visualization report. When the nobility tried to take him on, he brought out a panel showing people's true feelings, making it easy to tell friend from foe.

While the court officials were still sipping tea, reading the papers, and waiting to rise through the ranks, he worked performance reviews into the KPI system. When the Tatar cavalry invaded from the south, he led an assembly line production of firearms and gave the steppe warriors psychological trauma.

Some called him a capable statesman for the ages. Others called him a freak of the bureaucracy.

Xu Xian remained calm. “Don't get me wrong. I just think that if you're alive, you might as well work hard enough to make something of yourself.”

Besides, this shabby government office was a lot easier to hustle in than that shabby company of mine.