A Red-Hat Merchant? The Whole City Calls Me Benevolent Xu!

[Red-Capped Merchant] [Let the Grain Fly] [Rice Prices in Goose City]

Xu Sanchuan, a corporate drone who died suddenly from overwork, wakes up as a small-time smuggler in a border town of the Great Li dynasty. He is caught smuggling military salt and is about to be beheaded as a traitor.

Fortunately, he has a pair of treasure-appraising eyes: he can tell at a glance how much anything in the world is worth in silver.

Those eyes save his life from a fierce general’s blade and land him the border army’s most thankless task: turning a warehouse of moldy grain into a month’s worth of military pay for the entire camp, all within three days.

From then on, he specializes in deals no one else dares touch.

During a famine, instead of handing out porridge, he raises prices to draw grain merchants from every direction to the border. When refugees surround the city, he offers no charity, only work.

Every move looks like profiteering from disaster, yet in the end grain prices fall, military households receive their pay, and the refugees survive.

He cares about nothing but silver, yet the townsfolk erect shrines to pray for his long life and call him “Great Benefactor Xu.”

Silver buys trust, trust earns him an official appointment, and by the time that red hat is placed on his head, who will remember how he once knelt beneath a blade?

Someone asks him what he is after, having done so many good deeds.

Xu Sanchuan has only three answers:

“Make money!”

“Make money!”

“Make damn money!”