Great Ming: Bringing Corn to Jiangning, Shocking the Hongwu Emperor!

Zhang Tian transmigrates into the Ming dynasty as the county magistrate of Jiangning. He is a social phobe, yet he keeps the county running like clockwork: clean streets, city inspectors on patrol, and hygiene standards in the kitchens. He gets hybrid corn from Western merchants, yielding seven or eight hundred jin per mu and leaving the Ming dynasty's main crops far behind.

Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, traveling incognito, takes a bite of half-raw corn and nearly tears up. “Can this stuff really yield eight hundred jin?”

Back at the palace, he investigates: in the fifteenth year of Hongwu, an eight-year-old boy wandered to Jiangning. He had no father or mother and had never attended school for a single day, yet taught himself well enough to pass the county and provincial examinations and eventually become a magistrate. Zhu Yuanzhang's fingers tremble. That was the year his eldest grandson, Zhu Xiongying, was buried in a tomb that was later robbed, leaving no bones behind.

The blood from the Lan Yu case has barely dried, and Crown Prince Zhu Biao is already gravely ill. Zhang Tian is pondering how to avoid the imperial court when Zhu Yuanzhang arrives again with Zhu Biao. “How many corn seeds do you have left?” Zhang Tian rolls his eyes. What could he know? He has no idea that the old Zhu keeps staring at his face, seeing more and more of his own younger self. The Embroidered Uniform Guard has already investigated him from top to bottom. This is no ordinary county magistrate; he is a lost imperial descendant of the Zhu family.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Please do not imitate.