Great Shun's sea trade was exceptionally prosperous.
So much so that the Great Shun Emperor had an unusual fondness for using spices as compensation instead of money.
In the past, Liang Qu didn’t really care for this practice since he wasn’t an official and didn’t depend on the government.
But now, he thought it was truly a pain.
Imagine working at a job, and suddenly your boss tells you that from today onward, you won’t be getting a salary.
Instead, you can head to the warehouse and take some leftover stock home.
And when the one doing this is the Emperor, you have no choice but to comply, like a forced sale.
For instance, if pepper was worth twenty taels for a hundred catties and your monthly salary was twenty taels, they’d give you ten taels in silver and fifty catties of pepper.
If it were only this, that would still be manageable—you could just trade it for money.
However, the real trickery comes when you discover that when the spice is handed to you based on market value, selling it later reveals its price has significantly dropped!