In the third month of the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen era, Li Zicheng's army reached the walls of Beijing.
Despairing Emperor Chongzhen, Zhu Youjian, prepared to die for his country. The eunuch Wang Cheng'en presented a mysterious “Seven-Orifice Glazed Box,” claiming it was a treasure left by the missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell that could save the realm, but it needed the imperial seal to activate.
Chongzhen used the seal to open the box, and seven strange beams of light transformed into seven memorials floating in the air. When he opened the first, the “Southern Ming Crown Prince” memorial, the Hall of Heavenly Purity was instantly engulfed by visions of a sea of blood. The horrific scenes of Qing soldiers massacring a city, and the crown prince's cries for help, pierced his mind! A cold prompt appeared: stamping the imperial seal could save the crown prince, but three sections of Beijing's walls would collapse in return. To save his “son,” Chongzhen stamped the seal, and the walls came crashing down!
The Glazed Box was a higher-dimensional “civilization selection device”! Each memorial unleashed a terrifying disaster from a parallel universe, projecting it over reality: zombie plagues, frozen corpses in an ice age, fissures spewing magma, and man-eating monsters. Using the imperial seal to intervene required an “equivalent resource” from this timeline in exchange: provisions, troops, even years of life and human lives! Chongzhen was forced to become a cold-blooded “resource allocator.”
Two factions clashed: one wanted to destroy the box and save the country, the other to stake everything on one desperate gamble. Chongzhen gained a terrifying power: he could treat people as “resources” and forcibly extract them!
As he lay dying, Wang Cheng'en confessed that he came from a “Wu Sangui universe” frozen into extinction after Chongzhen's early death. He had transmigrated solely to repay a debt and change fate! The seventh memorial came from a historian in the twenty-second century: stamping the seal would annihilate the Ming Dynasty but preserve history; refusing would require Chongzhen to kill himself and seal away every disaster.
Chongzhen raised the imperial seal high and smashed it against the Glazed Box! The seal shattered, and the box burst with light! Chongzhen tossed up the white silk. As his consciousness faded, he saw the seven calamities sealed within the growth rings of a locust tree. His soul drifted through the void, witnessing three centuries of China's trials and transformations. The Ming Dynasty fell, and its sacrifices and choices became eternal in the void.
