The Ledger of the Southern Sea

In Song dynasty Lingnan, at the Guangzhou Revenue Office, A Shen is a lowly clerk with no rank or salary, scraping by on his writing skills. When the transport commissioner audits the accounts and finds 3,000 catties of salt missing, the garrison commander has taken it, and the revenue officer wants A Shen to take the fall and be thrown into the sea. But A Shen produces a wooden ledger recording every transaction. He negotiates with the commissioner over official caps and confronts the officer over embezzled shark skin. The accounts are balanced, but someone must die. Warehouse keeper A Fu sees something he shouldn't, and A Shen forces the officer to poison him. Leaving the office with silver and evidence, A Shen knows Lingnan is a swamp—once bloodied, he must walk over corpses. Investigating the mining tax, the garrison commander sends assassins to silence him, but A Shen kills them, finds secret letters, and takes the money. From Guangzhou to Yingzhou, from the Pearl River to the sea, each step is a death trap. He has no golden finger, doesn't read the classics, and only believes: endure the heat to get food. Promotion isn't about honoring ancestors; it's about carving a path in a rotten system, saving enough capital to fight his way out of Lingnan. — Description from novelcodex.org