Later Qi: From Merchant to Rule by the Five Powers

[Power struggles] [Ensemble cast] [No System] [Hardcore deduction] [No characters acting stupidly] [Slow-burn serious drama]

In the fourth year of Chengping, a hundred thousand enemy troops vanished into thin air outside the city, and their commander was assassinated.

At twenty-five, Lu Chengyan, the son of a merchant, was called upon in a crisis. He took up a bloodstained tiger tally and inherited a mess with granaries running on empty.

Within the walls, corrupt generals fought for power and gentry exploited the people. Beyond them, warlords circled the city and dark currents ran through the court.

He had neither an emperor's aura nor a System golden finger. To defend this isolated city, he could only rely on a merchant's methods: build infrastructure, open military farms, recruit bandits, and take salt deep into the mountains to persuade the chieftains to trade for grain.

In a troubled age when human lives were worth no more than grass, he followed a single principle: "Replace armed conflict with profit."

When imperial power and the great clans turned their blades on each other, and the woman he loved stained the long street with her blood for the sake of her principles,

he advanced step by step, outmaneuvering the world, yet failing to account for the human heart. In the end, he chose to end his own line, severing a thousand years of patriarchal clan law.

With no heir, the old order collapsed. The military, bureaucracy, maritime merchants, and gentry were forced to sit down at the negotiating table, ushering in a new order of "Five Factions Joint Rule" amid the turmoil.

The people of the world cursed him as a merchant who cared only for profit, never knowing that in this troubled age, he was the last man holding the collapsing world together.