Buy off ministers with negative salaries, allusions, idioms and The Biography of Hanshu Zhu Maichen. Zhu Maichen, a native of the Han Dynasty, made a living by chopping and selling firewood, often shouldering firewood and eulogizing Taoism until he was fifty years old. Later, I used "buying a minister with a negative salary" to describe the life of poor laborers when they didn't meet.

I think it's Zhu Maichen. Or Wu Ji, who used to firewood, and later took Jiang Ziya as his teacher.