At the End of the Dynasty, I Built an Age of Prosperity from Humble Beginnings

[Poor protagonist] [No System] [Ordinary-person perspective] [Mastermind] [Clever protagonist] [Warrior goddess] [Foreign tribes] [Technological development] [Industrial Revolution]

In the dynasty’s final years, land is swallowed up by the powerful. Court sessions continue, officials fill the steps before the throne, and reports are presented with due ceremony. Yet once an imperial edict leaves Zichen Hall, it is as if a clay ox has sunk into the sea. The figures in the tax ledgers grow ever larger, while the silver entering the treasury dwindles year by year. Reports from the provinces speak only of auspicious signs and victories, but the urgent dispatches carried by the relay horses are often secret pleas for help and bloodstained letters reporting rebellion…

In the countryside, five homes out of every ten stand empty. Across the fields, abandoned graves are becoming more numerous than houses. The survivors either band together in fortified villages, fierce as bandits, or sell their children for a few days’ worth of husks. The cities still ring with music, but the pleasure quarters and taverns are full of lost faces, drunk on oblivion and chasing sensual pleasures. At some point, the songs children sing have changed their tune…

This is not a collapse in a single moment, but a long, all-encompassing unraveling. It is like a towering ancient tree whose branches and trunk still stand, though its core has been hollowed out by termites, waiting only for a gust of wind that need not even be particularly strong. Everyone is waiting, waiting for something to end…