A Doctoral Student in the Jiajing Era

Japanese pirates ravage the southeastern coast, and the mudflats of Quanzhou are steeped in brine and corpses. In the north, Tatar cavalry pound at the passes, while the soldiers guarding the Nine Frontiers lack proper clothing and have run out of grain and fodder. In court, the Yan faction holds all the power. The Jiajing Emperor hides away in the Western Garden, seeking immortality through alchemy. The sea ban has cut off the people’s livelihoods, yet official and merchant collusion has made smuggling rampant. The so-called pirate crisis is the thunderclap heralding an empire’s decline. And this year is the Ming Dynasty’s last chance to survive.

Yang Bo, a twenty-first-century PhD in Ming history, has just used GIS sea charts to uncover the truth behind the pirate crisis during his dissertation defense. Then an accident sends him five hundred years into the past, into the body of Lei Lü, a tenant farmer’s son from Jinjiang, Quanzhou, who has eaten a poisonous mushroom and lies near death. The historical knowledge and strategies he once used in his study must now help him secure enough food to stay alive: his family has nothing, the rent is brutally high, his elder brother went off to war and vanished, and his mute younger sister scrapes by selling firewood in the streets.

He has no protagonist’s golden finger, only eyes that can see through history. He boils seawater to improve salt-making, gathers disaster victims to build fortifications, exposes secret smuggling schemes, and joins forces with allies to weather the maelstrom of officialdom. He leads local militia armed with hoes as weapons and uses the Mandarin Duck formation to strike the pirates hard. Risking his life to break the sea ban, he trades Quanzhou brine for supplies from the South Seas, stockpiling grain to save the people and using the weak to fight the strong.

The Yan faction plots against him, eunuchs demand bribes, and the Embroidered Uniform Guard hunts him down. Every step takes him across a blade’s edge. He only wanted to keep his family safe, but fate pushes him onto the stage of history. From tenant farmer on the mudflats, he rises to the imperial court and gazes toward the untamed Formosa. This is no ordinary transmigration story. It is a legend of a man of humble origins who defies fate and fights to secure one last chance for the tottering Ming Dynasty. Dare you join him in the game?