Reborn in the forty-second year of the Wanli reign, he becomes Zhu Zhishu, the fourteen-year-old heir to the Prince of Shu of the Great Ming.
The empire is on the brink of collapse. The Battle of Sarhu is just around the corner, and rebel bands are stirring beneath the surface. He is only a young prince, confined to his fief by ancestral law.
The court officials laugh at him for being young and foolish, obsessed with “curious techniques and ingenious devices.”
The southwestern native chieftains see him as a lamb to the slaughter and sharpen their knives.
Little do they know that while they are consumed by factional strife,
the salt wells of Zigong have already become the golden lifeblood with which he will ignite the Industrial Revolution;
the iron ore of Panzhihua is being smelted in blast furnaces into a surging river of metal, forged into razor-sharp guns;
and at the Shushan Institute of Natural Philosophy, future engineers and scientists are overturning the age under the guidance of the Encyclopedia of Natural Philosophy.
When the She-An Rebellion erupts, he leads a legion of Minie-ball musketeers, crushing the rebels to dust before the astonished eyes of Qin Liangyu.
When news of the Battle of Sarhu arrives and the entire court weeps, he produces the plans for a steam-powered warship and calmly tells his father, “Father, the times have changed.”
Starting in Shu, he will secure the southwest, intervene in Liaodong, and pacify the rebel bands.
Faced with an ancient empire on the verge of ruin, Zhu Zhishu makes his choice:
“I am not here to save the heavens from collapse. I am the Mandate of Heaven!”
The palaces of the Ming Dynasty all had the emperor's spies, some even overt spies, as well as secretly eunuchs, maids, and royal guards. Let's put it this way, almost all of them are the emperor's people. The vassal king basically had no chance to become big, only the chance to rebel. How did Zhu Yuanzhang become bigger and stronger? Their descendants know very well,
Logical thinking, truthful and not impetuous.