One Ledger Overwhelms the Land

The clan seized my family property, the officials detained my relatives, and they pressed a debt of three thousand dan of military grain onto my head. If I couldn't repay it in seven days, my mother would pay with her life, and my sister would enter the Salt Supervisor's mansion. Everyone waited to see me kneel at the ancestral hall. But they didn't know that in the abandoned granary my father left me, there was a bag of black salt that no one dared to eat. The salt merchants dismissed it as poison, but the military towns relied on it to survive. I used the black salt to pry open the dead men's camp, exchanging it for the first military grain contract; I used the military grain to raise my first band of death warriors; I used the death warriors to seize trade routes, open banks, build auction houses, and forge a military-industrial city. The clan said I broke the rules, the officials said I disrupted the salt laws, and the feudal lords said a lowly salt household like me had no right to meddle in the affairs of the realm. I closed my ledger. 'Then let's change the rules.'