Twice the soul returned, once it turned the tables. Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin opened his eyes again in the 17th year of Jiading in the Southern Song Dynasty with the pain of "no way to recover" when he first traveled to Song Lizong. In front of him are still the broken lights of Lin'an Palace, still the haze of Shi Miyuan's dictatorship, still the mess surrounded by gold and silver, and the people's livelihood is in decline - but this time, he is no longer the founding emperor who was eager for success and had empty ambitions.
After returning from the despair of crossing mountains and seas, he was well aware of the long-standing shortcomings of the Southern Song Dynasty: the scholar-bureaucrats ruined the country with empty talk, the imperial army was as rotten as a dead tree, Huizi devalued the people's livelihood and resented it, and there were even Mongolian cavalry watching eagerly in the north. He hid his sharp edge and used Lizong's body to lie dormant. He screened out loyalists and traitors in the densely populated court, and protected famous generals such as Meng Gong and Yu Jie under his wings. He used the improved "guarding method" to reshape the elite brigade of the Forbidden Army; he learned the lesson from the previous alliance with Mongolia to destroy the Jin Dynasty. He first united with the Jin Dynasty to defeat the Mongolian army, then went to the west to destroy Xixia and cut off the right arm of Mongolia. Finally, he sent his troops to the Northern Expedition and declared "Jingkang Shame" at the top of Kaifeng City.
From the Huaihe River to the Yellow River, from the Hexi Corridor to the Monan Grassland, this emperor who traveled twice used the iron fist tempered by the troubled times of the Five Dynasties, combined with the political resilience of the scholar-bureaucrats of the Southern Song Dynasty, and worked step by step to finally restore the glory of the remnant Song Dynasty, which was relatively peaceful, and achieved the eternal legend of "Chongguang Zhongxing".
