From the second half of 2026 to the spring of 2027.
"One Sheet of Paper" was noticed. It was shared twenty thousand times in three hours, and by the next morning, forty-seven case files had piled up in the inbox.
The investors came, offering a valuation of thirty million yuan. The regulators came, laying out two options. Then the people involved came, one after another, waiting downstairs.
This volume tells how one person was thrust into the public eye. It also tells how, in order to survive, he pressed down a person's account with his own hands for the first time.
That person was Wu Desheng. Forty-six years old, a scaffolder, with stage-three pneumoconiosis. He submitted supplementary documents three times and made six round trips. In the end, he died on January 3. His death certificate said "respiratory failure."
After that came an old man, a secondhand bookstore, seven ledgers, 4.3 billion yuan, and 110,000 people.
For thirteen years, the old man did the same thing: he wrote off debts that could never be recovered, one by one, then never told the people concerned a single word.
He said he was saving people. He also said he was afraid they would find out.
Main characters in this volume: Wu Desheng; Zeng Li; Qiu Mingyuan; Director Zheng; Han Xiao, a sociology graduate student; and Guo Wanshan, an old man who runs a secondhand bookstore.
At the end of the volume, Meng Xianjin turns to the first page of the ledger.
When you read it, you'll understand why the slip of paper from Chapter One of Volume One was pinned above his own head.