I Became the Richest Man by Settling Accounts

In the Daqian Dynasty, banks were bigger than the government. The imperial power did not extend to the county, and all the money of the people was in the hands of the banks. Deposits and loans, bills of exchange, secret account transfers - whoever controls the banks controls the lifeblood of the country. The common people only knew that the shopkeeper at the counter was very decent, but they did not know that what was written on the last page of the account book could make the governor of a province lose his head. Lu Wenyuan was the lowest accountant at Yongchang Bank in Linjiang County. What he did every day was copying, running errands, and getting scolded. For three years, no one had looked at him. He didn't argue, he lowered his head and looked at the account book page by page. When others look through the ledger, all they see are numbers. He flipped through the ledger and saw the people behind the numbers - who was lying, who was hiding money, and who was weaving a web with the flow of money. He didn't tell anyone about it. Until the day of the accounting ceremony, he spent three months settling a dead account that no one could solve for three years. The chief shopkeeper rewarded the second shopkeeper Sun Jingtang in front of the whole shop. Lu Wenyuan stood at the end of the crowd without saying a word, folded the manuscript and put it in his arms. After the show, he went to the backyard to get something and saw Sun Jingtang having a secret conversation with an imperial accountant from the capital in a secret room. What was spread out on the table was the original copy of his dead debt. He only heard half of the sentence—— "This account is from the late emperor——" The door moved. From that moment on, Lu Wenyuan knew that he was involved in a situation far bigger than a dead debt. A shortfall of three thousand taels led to the whereabouts of 320,000 taels of internal funds. Behind the 320,000 taels, half a large bank was running a "secret account" simultaneously. The starting point of the dark account happens to be...