Outside Fugu City.
A donkey cart ambled slowly forward.
The frail-looking young Literary Scholar sat casually.
One leg was bent and stretched out, while the other was raised, using his knee as a makeshift desk. With a brush in his right hand, he filled in figures on a bamboo-slip form, sometimes calculating in his head and sometimes counting on his fingers. Whenever he was unsure of the data, he would take out an abacus and work it a few times.
Several dozen rolls of already-measured farmland data were placed beside the young Literary Scholar. The square, level, rope, compass, and other tools had all been stored in a large bamboo basket, while ten sturdy young men dressed in coarse hemp clothing silently followed on either side of the donkey cart.
"What's making such a racket?"
The young Literary Scholar was concentrating on checking the measurements.
Several faint sobs drifted into his ears.
The tune rose and fell in three twists, making anyone who heard it restless and irritated.
These past few days, he had risen before dawn and gone to bed after dark, crossing mountains and rivers and practically touring the entire territory under Fugu City. To obtain more precise measurements from fields of every imaginable shape, he had spared no effort. After measuring them, he still had to organize, categorize, and file the data... He was so busy that he fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow each night.
Today's progress had been anything but smooth, and he was already frustrated.
Even after checking the data twice, there was still a six-percent discrepancy.
Just as he had finally sorted it out, the noise interrupted him again.
The young Literary Scholar was rather peeved.
An attendant who had gone out to ask about it soon returned to report,