When I opened my eyes, I stood in the cold wind of Meishan Mountain, holding three bloody battle reports in my hands.
Luoyang fell, King Fu was cooked; the city of Xiangyang was destroyed, King Xiang was defeated; on the front line of Songjin, 130,000 Ming elites were turning into a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
I am Chongzhen. He was the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty - there were only three years left before I hanged myself from this old locust tree.
Above the court, the Gonggun princes were still arguing over the pay; outside the pass, Huang Taiji had sharpened his butcher's knife; in the hinterland, Li Zicheng's banner with the word "Chuang" was rolling up a prairie fire.
Everywhere in this empire was leaking, and I, an engineer with confused memories of my previous life, became its only tinkerer.
There is no system, no sage to guide you. There is only a set of cold and majestic industrial maps in my mind that do not belong to this era. "Pass the decree," I said to the shivering eunuch and eunuch, my voice suppressing the wind and snow outside the palace. "There will be no sea ban and no increase in wages. I want to open mines, make steel, and build machines."
From the first coke blast furnace in Xishan to the roaring steam ironclads on the shores of the Bohai Sea. When the volleys of flintlock guns tore apart the Eight Banners cavalry, and when the railway tracks roared to transport food and soldiers to all directions, everyone finally understood:
What I want to save is not this decadent dynasty.
What I want to forge is a new era of steel.
