[Transmigration + political intrigue + hard-nosed reform]
Shen Yue, a history student, opens his eyes to find himself as the “outrageous” Zhengde Emperor, Zhu Houzhao.
He has no System, no supernatural powers, only half a copy of the History of the Ming and a smattering of basic modern knowledge. But the mess before him is worse than the history books describe: Liu Jin controls the Eastern Depot, with more gold in his private treasury than in the imperial coffers; civil officials cry, “The ancestral laws must not be violated,” while secretly annexing thousands of acres of fertile land; Mongol cavalry raid the borders, vassal princes rule as warlords, and Japanese pirates ravage Jiangnan…
Shen Yue grits his teeth: No cheat? Then he’ll push through reforms the hard way!
To fight the eunuch faction, he has the Embroidered Uniform Guard keep watch for three years, digging irrefutable proof of corruption out of the accounting records. When confiscating their estates, he doesn’t even spare the gold bricks hidden in the wall cavities;
To take on the civil officials, he brings the Fish-Scale Register to Jiangnan, calculates the land taxes down to the last acre, and stuns the defenders of “ancestral law” with the per-capita land tax reform;
To strengthen the army, he hunkers down in the firearms camp to work on purifying saltpeter, then hammers away at the rifling until the range of the Folangji cannons increases by three li;
At the walls of Yingzhou, he personally leads the new army in a “three-rank volley,” beating the Mongol prince into submission: “You won’t dare invade south for ten years!”
Everyone laughs at him for defying convention, but he smiles at the successfully cultivated sweet potato fields, the new canal boats, and the army drilling nearby.
A historian of later generations sighs: “Emperor Zhengde had no extraordinary encounters. Through knowledge and sheer stubbornness, he somehow dragged the Ming Dynasty back from the edge of the abyss and onto the great road. Absurd, but unbelievably satisfying!”
