The Treacherous Minister

The Treacherous Minister is a historical time-travel novel by the web novelist Futian, roughly 2.34 million characters long, serialized on Qidian and now complete. The protagonist, Xu Xun, after avenging an old wrong, unexpectedly travels back five hundred years to the Ming dynasty's restoration heyday. This is the Hongzhi era of Emperor Xiaozong: the realm is at peace, and Nanjing's Qinhuai pleasure quarters and the Jianghuai romantic scenes present a picture of prosperous tranquility. Yet beneath this serene surface lies a world where "loyal worthies are everywhere, while the humble are worse off than dogs," and an orphan with no one to rely on finds it extremely hard to survive and gain a foothold. Xu Xun inhabits the identity of "Seventh Young Master Xu," the dissolute son of the second branch of Nanjing's impoverished Xu family; his father vanished long ago, the family's fields and property are coveted by the elder branch, his clansmen look down on him, and they even want to use the clan assembly to pin a crime on him and drive him from the house. Facing this crisis, he is in no hurry to escape; instead he turns the situation to his advantage, using the few helpers around him first to free himself from the Xu family's grip, then step by step entering a larger field of power. He gains access through the resident eunuch, stirs up major cases locally, and thus embarks on the path of a sycophantic official; later he enters the capital and befriends Zhu Houzhao, still the crown prince, and ruler and minister take to each other, handling the emperor above and disciplining the hundred officials below, turning the word "treacherous minister" into a usable mask. Set against the officialdom and street life at the turn of the Hongzhi and Zhengde reigns, the book shows how a modern soul, beneath lofty moral rhetoric, parries every move and rides the currents to rise.