The Ledger of Losses

Overnight, the Shen family, the great merchant house of the Dayin Empire, is raided and stripped of everything. The eldest son, Shen Que, escapes with the family’s ancestral blackwood ledger of deficits. It can reveal only one transaction, one person’s shortfall, and its cost at a time. It cannot be used to fight, and each revelation shaves a year off his life. Starting as a bookkeeping clerk in exile, Shen Que and his three younger siblings unravel the black market in salt licenses, the deadly impasse of the grain barges, and the northern supply routes. Whenever their rivals go bankrupt, they swoop in and turn the tables, until a nationwide ledger of salt-tax deficits lets them reopen the old case, earn a noble title, and return home. This is an anti-power-fantasy epic of family and business warfare.