In the final years of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang unexpectedly transmigrates to the modern era. In the book Those Things in the Ming Dynasty, he discovers that thirty years after his death, the Prince of Yan, Zhu Di, will launch the Jingnan Campaign, while the imperial grandson, Zhu Yunwen, will disappear without a trace. Returning to Yingtian with half a page of history, he looks at the princes he himself enfeoffed and, for the first time, understands from an emperor's perspective the bloody foreshadowing behind “historical inevitability.”
To rewrite the ending in which his descendants slaughter one another, Zhu Yuanzhang, frail in his old age, revises the Great Ming Ancestral Instructions: stripping the vassal princes of their military power, choosing capable ministers for the Eastern Palace, and even incorporating military tactics he saw in the modern era into his battle formations. But when the Prince of Yan enters the capital, the Xuanwu pattern on his boot sole matches the history books exactly. Then there's the mysterious old soldier Zhu Yuanzhang encounters at the training ground, whose words and manner are strikingly like those of Yao Guangxiao, the “Black-Clad Chancellor.” These signs make him realize that the wheels of history have already begun turning in the shadows.
An iron-fisted emperor who founded a dynasty, and a desperate attempt to defy fate despite knowing it may be impossible. As imperial red ink from the Golden Throne collides with modern print across time, Zhu Yuanzhang grips his bloodstained wolf-hair brush and sneers: The history books say I'm bloodthirsty and suspicious? Then let this age-old controversy begin with tearing up the first page of the “Jingnan script.”
