Victoria's Afghan Warlord

Chen Feng, a graduate student in history, accidentally transmigrates to mid-nineteenth-century Afghanistan and becomes the son of a small-time landowner on the verge of bankruptcy in the Herat region. His parents are slaughtered by marauding soldiers, and warlords covet his estate. In this desperate situation, the [Victoria Library System] binds itself to him, and a cold mechanical voice rings out: “Unify Herat within three years. Failure will mean execution.”

The System grants access to every book published worldwide in the nineteenth century, but offers no ready-made blueprints, leaving him to make his own improvements. Each mission has a strict deadline, and every failure means death. Chen Feng casts aside any supposed moral limits and assumes the identity of Ahmad Khan. He monopolizes the grain trade with high-yield wheat, arms his tenant farmers as a private militia with rifled guns, crushes rebellious tribes with a “scorched-earth policy,” and uses a secret police force to surveil the entire country.

He is a self-serving dictator who will sacrifice tens of thousands of civilians to unify Afghanistan. To counter the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia, he is willing to secretly ally with Germany. To bring about the Industrial Revolution, he dares to bathe religious holy sites in blood. On this chaotic land in Central Asia, the butcher's blade of iron rule collides with industrial civilization, and the iron hooves of dictatorship trample tribal fragmentation. An age of ruthless ambition, belonging to him, is quietly rising in the shadow of the Victorian era...