I, the Top Scholar, Tear Apart the Nation's Fate from the Start

【Dynasty-as-farm theory】+【Ensemble cast in an alternate history】+【One heroine】+【Decisive and ruthless】+【Subverts the usual tropes】 My name is Su Changqing. I was once the youngest top scorer in the Great Feng dynasty, with a glittering future ahead of me. Overnight, I became a prisoner and was exiled to White Bone Commandery, a land ravaged by plague, where the living were so scarce that bones lay exposed in the wilderness. I caught the plague and burned with a fever that would not break. Just when I thought I was going to die here, I saw... I saw golden threads of “fortune” rising from the heads of every commoner struggling to survive, merging into a mighty river that surged all the way to the imperial palace in the capital. And from the palace, streams of “death energy,” black as ink, flowed back against the current, turning this place into a living hell! A natural disaster? No, this was a man-made calamity! The emperor was no Son of Heaven. He was an evil dragon, sprawled across the empire’s dragon veins and devouring the flesh and blood of countless millions of his subjects! On the brink of death, I reached out with a trembling hand to a passing imperial envoy. I stole a sliver of his “official fortune.” The next moment, my fever broke. I lived. From that day on, I became a thief, one who steals from Heaven and changes fate, pilfering fortune itself. I steal corrupt officials’ wealth, leaving them penniless overnight. I sever tyrants’ lifespans, so they are trampled to death by a spooked horse the moment they step outside. The common people revere me as a living immortal. But I know that on the golden, resplendent Dragon Throne, the slumbering evil dragon has already caught the scent of me, the little thief. Its minions are rushing in from every direction, ready to crush me, the bug who dared touch its “rations,” to dust. But it doesn’t know. I am not stealing fortune. I am stealing the Mandate of Heaven. After slaying the dragon, I will take that throne myself and rewrite the rules.