The Mo Clan Rises Amid the Tumult of the Late Qing

In the twenty-ninth year of the Daoguang reign, a severe drought struck Guangxi. The land was strewn with the dead, and the flames of rebellion were already spreading in secret at Jintian.

Mo Zhenbang, a modern graduate student of Qing history, opens his eyes to find himself a scholar of the Mo clan in Beiliu County, Wuzhou Prefecture. He inherits a complete mess: “eight hundred mu of poor fields with falling yields, a thousand clansmen waiting to be fed, and a fifty-tael loan shark pounding on the door.” The clan elders are holding the deed to their ancestral land, ready to sell it for grain and scrape by.

Above him is a rotten Qing court, below him rampant banditry, and in another year the flames of the Taiping Rebellion will reach his doorstep. Selling the land means death; keeping it means death too. Mo Zhenbang clutches the secrets hidden in his mind: several pale-blue compartments that can store items, and a concealed interface that lets him accumulate experience and cultivate talent.

He cannot just sit back and wait to die.

First, he uses sugarcane seed to solve the urgent food shortage, transports goods in his storage compartments to evade bandits, and gains experience through practice to train agricultural experts and blacksmiths. Then he earns official honors and organizes a local militia, using the Qing court’s weapons to train his own troops. On the battlefields against bandits and the Taiping Army, he builds a reputation and expands his power. From secretly smuggling salt and iron to support his clan to building a talent pipeline in “literature, warfare, agriculture, industry, and intelligence,” every step takes him along history’s razor edge.

In the eyes of his clansmen, he is the “Scholar Zhenbang” who can make sure they all have enough to eat. To the authorities, he is a “brilliant militia commander” who suppresses rebels. Only Mo Zhenbang himself knows he has never intended to serve the Qing court.

He will make sure the Mo clan finds its footing in these troubled times, and make the rotten Qing dynasty pay the price it deserves in this age of ceaseless war!

A tale of rising through an age of chaos, beginning as a clan scholar, secretly building an army under the guise of organizing a militia, and ultimately toppling the Qing court,