A Beggar in the Great Ming: From the Start, I Give Chongzhen Five Hundred More Years to Live

Lin Fan, director of a modern museum, wakes up to find himself a beggar on the verge of freezing and starving to death in the first year of Chongzhen! With the most ill-fated emperor in history about to take the throne, the Ming dynasty is doomed, and he’s doomed too!

“Other people transmigrate into princes and ministers. I start with a broken bowl? Even Hell difficulty isn’t this bad!”

Fortunately, the Nation-Strengthening Life-Extension System binds itself to him just in time, offering bizarre tasks with generous rewards: castrating pigs earns high-yield seeds, making toilet paper earns a salt-refining method, and writing a book called Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio even unlocks “military boxing”!

To survive, and to stop his buddy Chongzhen from hanging himself from a crooked-neck tree a few years from now, Lin Fan has no choice but to roll up his sleeves and get to work!

From the start, a plate of pork intestines and a bowl of spicy hotpot take the capital by storm, making him a fortune. At court, he pulls out a “history book” and spills the future. Chongzhen looks at him in alarm: “Could you be a fortune-teller, my dear minister?” The officials whisper among themselves: “Look at the way His Majesty gazes at this beggar… Could he be partial to men?”

Lin Fan: “…Your Majesty, I only want to work for you. I don’t want to be Daji!”

Watch Lin Fan use modern knowledge to crush the competition: spreadsheets leave the Grand Secretariat dumbfounded, pre-prepared meals send the army’s combat power through the roof, beauty salons and perfume pry open noblewomen’s purses, and modern schools humiliate rotten Confucians! A former pig castrator? What a joke. In the blink of an eye, he’s the empire’s CEO behind the scenes!

Execute treacherous ministers, save the worthy, build foreign trade, train a new army! He dishes out satisfying face-slapping all along the way, while raising women’s status so that the women of the Ming can earn money, divorce their husbands, and become CEOs too!

When Lin Fan finally gains the ability to hear what the officials are thinking, court life gets even more exciting… “Your Majesty! There’s absolutely nothing between us!” As Lin Fan grumbles, he helps Chongzhen turn the Ming dynasty into an empire on which the sun never sets, extending its life by five hundred years!