Ancestors, Save Me! The Great Ming Is Doomed

In the first year of Chongzhen, the young emperor Zhu Youjian knelt before the Imperial Ancestral Temple and wept in despair before Zhu Yuanzhang’s memorial tablet. “Ancestor, save me! The Ming is doomed!” As soon as the words left his mouth, a commanding figure emerged from the tablet: the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, whose soul possessed the young emperor’s body and took control of it. From then on, the Chongzhen Emperor who was known to history as suspicious, hot-tempered, and destined to hang himself at Coal Hill changed. At court, he stunned the Donglin faction with a single order: “Wei Zhongxian will remain in his post for now.” He revived the Embroidered Uniform Guard, flayed corrupt officials and stuffed their skins with grass, and ground the gentry of Jiangnan into the dirt. On the Liaodong front, he reorganized the border troops using Hongwu-era training methods, leaving the Later Jin bewildered and reeling. When peasant uprisings broke out everywhere, he employed a strategy of “crushing the ringleaders and pacifying the rest,” rewriting Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong’s stories according to his own script. On one side stood the ancestor’s ruthless iron will; on the other, Chongzhen’s ideals of benevolence. One body, two souls, ruling the empire together. “Ancestor, would you call this tyrannical rule?” “Foolish boy, I’m keeping you alive!” Watch this eccentric pair of grandfather and grandson defy fate and keep the Ming, a dynasty doomed to fall, alive by sheer force, transforming it into the unprecedented “Hongwu Restoration, Chongzhen Edition!”