After the Jingkang Incident, Zhao Chen, crown prince of the Southern Song, uses modern knowledge to reshape the nation’s destiny. He establishes a military medical academy to save lives, uses exploding shells and land mines to break the Jin army’s Iron Pagoda forces, introduces double-entry bookkeeping and reforms the paper currency to strengthen public finances, and uses mathematics to plan levees and farming to pacify the Mongols. In the end, he recovers the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun. Through political struggles with Qin Hui’s faction, he wields technology as a blade and institutions as a shield, forging an era of peace and prosperity. Yet in the morning breeze atop the walls of Yanyun, the gaze of the young Genghis Khan as he strokes a plowshare gifted by the Song hints at a new tide rising beneath the surface.
