"Dragon Roaring Jiawu"
On a winter night in the fifteenth year of Guangxu's reign, a corpse floated under the ice in Yingtai.
The young emperor looked at himself bleeding in the mirror and tasted the almond-flavored truth - this body was being eaten away by chronic poison and turned into a puppet of history.
He is a time traveler trapped in the body of an emperor, with a half-finished blueprint for the industrial revolution hidden in his sleeve.
When Cixi's emerald armor tapped on the draft of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, he was using rouge and gouache to draw a world map on Concubine Zhen's back. The twelve-chapter pattern on the hem of the dragon robe is sewn with the firearms drawings of the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau; under the Panlong algae well in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, a steam engine roars in the shadows.
"Lord Buddha, this Longevity Glazed Buddha uses a new kiln from the Tianjin Machinery Bureau."
He knelt down to offer a birthday gift, and the gilt base concealed the cooling device of the Maxim machine gun. Li Lianying's whisk swept across the palace steps, but could not sweep away the telegraph codes that had seeped into the cracks of the gold bricks.
From secretly substituting arsenic in Cixi's medicinal diet to assembling a submarine using the stone boats of the Summer Palace;
From changing the imperial examination policy topic to "On Electricity and National Destiny" to letting eunuchs dress up as merchants to purchase London arms stocks——
He stepped on the bones of Manchu and Han dignitaries and ignited the industrial revolution in the underground palace of the Forbidden City.
But the noose of history always hangs overhead:
Whenever a reformist was saved, there would be Confucian scholars arguing against each other in the Confucius Temple;
For every mile of railway built, three more chastity archways collapsed along the Yellow River;
And that hand that travels through time and space is becoming transparent with every change...
