Holding the Sword and Falling

Wang Ye, a 21st century financial mathematics major, traveled back in time to the fifteenth year of Jiaqing. His first decision was not to take the exam for the top prize or to climb up to the powerful - it was to go south and build his own business from scratch on the island in Qiongzhou, which was regarded as a place of exile. In the past ten years, he has developed the technology of purifying private salt into a network of contacts covering Fujian and Guangdong provinces, but he failed to retain the people he really wanted to meet. Deep in the Min Mountains, he rescued another traveler-Chen Feng. He had a doctorate in materials science and was the top scorer in the examination in the north. He was promoted to the second rank of minister of the Ministry of Industry. However, because of the reform of agricultural tools, which touched the foundation of imperial power, he was exiled by Jiaqing and hunted down. His wife and daughter died tragically. We landed on the same day, half a city away. One goes north and one goes south. Two completely different paths of institutional reform intersect in a pool of blood in Minshan...