After the New Year, as the seventh year of Yonghe began, Liu Cheng immediately prepared to launch a new special project.
He had no choice. With his lowly background, getting ahead meant having the drive to undertake projects independently. Huan Wen had held half the realm in his hands at forty, yet still fretted day and night, wanting to ease the country's burdens with a Northern Expedition. With Xi Chao's family background-and, according to the setting, being a year younger than him-he had traveled thousands of li from home to make venture investments right after getting married... What did you, Liu Acheng, a member of the Northern Migrant Shan Family, think you were doing if you weren't working hard?
Even if he worked himself to a sudden death, so be it. Even in death, he had to leave behind some deeds to inspire his old friend Mr. Shen Jin! He couldn't die, have his coffin returned to the South of the Yangtze, and let his fellow countrymen from the Liu Clan of Pengcheng ask how Liu Acheng had died.
Stuffed himself to death drinking lotus root soup and eating bream and white sheep meat.
That was the death Mr. Luo aspired to. He couldn't do that.
In simple terms, Liu Acheng currently had three core projects in mind, two of them long-term undertakings, one public and one private. The private one was writing Popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Liu Acheng planned to write it slowly over three to five years, riding hard on the fame of the three leading contemporary historians in Huan Wen's headquarters to produce a monumental work-one that even the old woman selling lotus roots outside the east gate could understand. The other, public project was taking an active part in the Huan Wen group's core