Account books were thrown into the fire one by one, hot air permeating the area.0

It was already April[1]. Jiangling Prefecture in Huzhou was located in Jiangnan, so even at night, it was quite hot. With such humid weather and this intense fire burning, everyone had sweat on their foreheads.0

However, no one dared to delay a second. There were still several large boxes of account books stacked all around them. But they had to browse through each book before throwing it into the fire, repeating this until they finished burning those boxes.0

Burning them one by one like this was time-consuming. They had been doing this for most of the night, yet there were still so many account books left. Everyone was sweating, and their faces were black with soot.0

These account books contained more than 10 years' worth of transaction details from the Yanqing Merchant’s Association. They were far more detailed than the account books Liu Futong had. Moreover,...0