Linchuan Academy

In the eighth year of Tiansheng, during the Northern Song dynasty, Lichuan Academy gained a mathematics teacher with a gaze like iron. Lin Zhiyuan, a bankrupt private equity trader, woke from a drunken stupor and found himself hurled into the eleventh century, an age of extreme material scarcity. Faced with corrupt officials and local tyrants using a tax scam to drive farmers to their deaths, he didn't wax poetic about the wind and moon. Instead, he coolly unleashed weapons from a thousand years in the future: options short-selling, double-entry bookkeeping, and leveraged buyouts. He didn't want a reputation as an upright official. He wanted control of the very mechanisms that made the entire Song dynasty run. Under his tutelage, legendary figures took on radically different roles. At twenty-five, Wang Anshi became a hardline commander wielding labor laws and slaughtering Khitan heavy cavalry with barbed wire and fragmentation grenades. At twenty-five, Xue Xiang became a ruthless financial magnate, using paper currency and cheap green salt to drain the Western Xia treasury dry. The scientist Su Song abandoned his refined pursuits and personally fired up the boilers of giant steam-powered warships. And Li Qingwan, queen of logistics, took control of the empire's economic lifelines with her vast Red Merchant Guild. As the machinery of the Song dynasty roared day and night, triggering its first crisis of overcapacity and workers being devoured by the system, the lofty Emperor Renzong finally realized in horror that the monster called capital and industry had legally locked feudal imperial power inside an iron cage. No System, no magic, only the cruel iron laws of economics and the overwhelming force of modern firearms. Watch as Lin Zhiyuan uses a single ledger to force the ancient Song dynasty into an age of capitalist expansion and oceanic exploration!