Reborn as Lin Fengxiang: Wings of the Heavenly Kingdom

In the autumn of 1854, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’s Northern Expeditionary Army was trapped in Dongguang County, Hebei. Out of food and cut off from reinforcements, they stood on the brink of annihilation. Lin Fengxiang opened his eyes. The memories flooding his mind clashed violently with another soul: he came from the future, the youngest chief project engineer in the national defense industry, specializing in energetic materials and small arms systems. Outside, the Qing army surrounded them on all sides. Inside the tent, the surviving soldiers sat with ashen faces. History told him what came next: the breakout would fail, he would hide in a burrow and be captured, then suffer a thousand cuts fifteen days later. But as he stared at the few remaining boxes of crude gunpowder in the camp, what came to mind were formulas for making nitrocellulose, process parameters for granulated propellant, and the directional fragmentation design of land mines. “Pass the word. Collect everyone’s urine and scrape the soot from the bottoms of the pots.” Before dawn, earth-shaking explosions shattered the silence of Dongguang County. This was no ordinary gunpowder, but high-energy explosives made with purified ingredients in precise proportions. Lin Fengxiang led three thousand survivors, using the chaos to fight their way east. Along the way, they scraped saltpeter from alkaline soil and made granulated powder in ruined temples. They turned discarded iron pots into fragmentation mines and villagers’ wooden plows into pressure-triggered booby traps. The pursuing Qing troops were blown into disarray again and again by new weapons that seemed like sorcery, forced to watch as a force that should have been wiped out grew stronger with every battle. Three months later, Lin Fengxiang stood on the headland at Dengzhou, with the reorganized “First Battalion of the Heavenly Character” behind him and a sample of sulfuric acid made by the lead-chamber process, freshly produced in trials, in his hand. The sea wind howled. His gaze passed over the Qing camps and fixed on a more distant horizon. The Qing court thought he was nothing but a rebel outlaw. They did not know that the man they faced would bring an entire era to an end.