[Hardcore Farming] + [Crushing Them with Institutions] + [Clash of Civilizations]
After transmigrating to the late Ming, all I want is to quietly make steel.
One furnace produces a hundred tons. Monthly output: fifty thousand kilos.
The Chongzhen Emperor trembles as he grants me permission to open mines, while the Donglin faction calls me a traitor.
He sneers. “Can you pay a million taels in military wages each month? He can.”
From then on, I become the emperor’s moneybag.
The Eight Beauties of Qinhuai come to be “celebrities,” while Shanxi merchants scramble for “steel futures.”
Hong Taiji’s envoy asks to buy cannons. I shake my head. “I don’t sell weapons. How about fertilizer?”
Sun Yuanhua comes to discuss the Western method of water management. I hand him blueprints for a steam engine.
Then a steam locomotive puffs white smoke as it rolls along a concrete road.
The Chongzhen Emperor visits Mengyin in person and sees a school for child laborers, a department store, and the newspaper’s front-page headline: “Ammonia Synthesis Achieved.”
“Minister Lin, what is all this?”
I lay out the future for him:
“In the seventeenth year of Chongzhen’s reign, Your Majesty will hang yourself at Coal Hill.”
“The Qing army will enter the pass, followed by the Ten Days of Yangzhou.”
The emperor collapses to the ground.
“But now, history has changed.”
I point to the flames of the new blast furnace outside the window.
“Your Majesty, choose: will you be the last emperor, or the first constitutional emperor of a new age?”
The furnace glows red.
A civilization is about to be forged.
-Hardcore farming, institutional supremacy, civilizational evolution
This isn’t a rebellion. It’s an operating-system upgrade for the Great Ming.
