One sentence-"This is the Son of Heaven's will"-ground the offered stepping stone to dust.
Sun Yuan's gaze wandered as his thoughts raced, weighing how to respond.
Yan Ci once again turned his attention to the tiny, meticulous script on the Xuan paper before Wei Nisheng, trying to find even a single error in the calculations.
But compared with his fleeting glimpse earlier, this closer scrutiny only left him more alarmed the longer he looked.
Earlier, he had only noticed the neatly categorized headings.
Now, examining them intently, he realized this was nothing like an ordinary bookkeeper's method of checking entries one by one.
Wei Zi had actually divided each year's income and expenditure into dozens of categories.
Each category was further divided by month, with intersecting rows and columns forming a grid.
Whenever an expenditure was entered into the table, it was compared with expenditures under the same category in other months.
The moment a figure showed a discrepancy in a horizontal comparison or a vertical review, he immediately added a note beside it.
Not only had no one in the Revenue and Expenditure Bureau ever used this accounting method, but Yan Ci himself, who had lived half a century, had never even heard of it.
The old way of checking accounts was to verify one entry at a time, moving on only after the previous entry had been checked.
Whatever could not be finished today would be continued tomorrow.
If someone had deliberately scrambled the accounts, merely putting the years back in order could take several days.
But Wei Nisheng's tabular method was like laying all the existing accounts out on a single chessboard at once.
Horizontally, he examined each month's expenditures within the same category and year; vertically, he examined the connections between different categories within that year.