Great Ming: I, Jiajing, Cultivate Immortality and Attain the Dao

[Historical speculation] + [Alternate history] + [Emperor] + [Great Ming] + [System]

After transmigrating into the Great Ming dynasty as the Taoist emperor Jiajing, the difficulty is set to hell from the start!

The bad news: Powerful ministers control the court, the treasury is emptier than my pockets, and the civil officials are forcing me to accept the Great Rites Controversy, trying to turn me into a puppet!

The good news: The One Emperor Cultivation System awakens! Governing the country and strengthening the army boosts my cultivation, and killing corrupt officials can even earn me merit!

Faced with the entire court pressuring me, I fly into a rage and issue an imperial decree to exterminate the ringleaders’ nine clans!

[Ding! Congratulations, Host, on exercising imperial authority for the first time. Rewards: one Nine-Turn Golden Elixir and one Ziwei Emperor’s Art!]

The officials are horrified, thinking I’ve gone completely mad. Little do they know that I’ve already set foot on the path to immortality, and can see through the sins in people’s hearts with a wave of my hand! The supposedly upright chief minister who’s always pleading poverty? I expose his billions in assets right there in court and confiscate his estate!

Yan Song tearfully remonstrates: “Your Majesty, your obsession with alchemy could bring ruin to the nation!”

I pull out a blueprint for hybrid rice yielding three thousand jin per mu. “My dear minister, would this be enough to fill the Great Ming treasury?”

Qi Jiguang urgently reports that Japanese pirates are ravaging the coast, while the entire court is at a loss!

I casually produce the Void Refining Art, then outfit the entire army with a hundred thousand spiritual-energy AK-47s. “A mere band of Japanese pirates? Flatten Fusang for me, and capture their emperor alive!”

Just as the realm is pacified and the four seas submit, the skies above the Forbidden City suddenly darken, and billions of bolts of tribulation lightning crash down!

The officials kneel and tremble, thinking Heaven’s punishment is upon them.

But they see me rise into the sky and shatter the heavenly tribulation with a single sword strike, proclaiming before all: “My journey is to lead the Great Ming, as one nation, to ascend to immortality!”