Boiling the Sea

A convict sent off to boil salt used nothing but a ledger to topple a dying dynasty.

In the forty-seventh year of the Suiyuan era, Xu Qi, a convict assigned to the salt kitchens of the Great Chun, opened his eyes amid a pile of corpses.

In his previous life, he had been drowning in debt, taken the blame for someone else, and died in a detention center. When he woke again, he had seven and a half pounds of iron shackles on his ankles and a brine pool no one cared about, even when it boiled dry, in front of him.

He knew no martial arts and had no System, only a ledger that any old cost estimator could calculate. But when he crunched the numbers, he discovered that the world was falling apart in a remarkably orderly way. As long as he could make sense of the books, even the emperor's throne might be within reach.