During the Chongzhen period of the late Ming Dynasty, a modern military engineer came through time. He did not rebel or claim to be king, but only made rules.
His name is Yang Dinghua. From the first flintlock gun in the private dock of Linjiang Prefecture to the fire dragon machine in the swamps of Henan; from the team of female craftsmen under the Land Equalization Order to the three-year agreement on the platform of the Forbidden City - he spent sixteen years planting a seed called "industrialization" in this empire that was about to collapse.
But rules are harder to make than guns. The suspicion of the imperial power, the backlash of the gentry, the inertia of the system, and the collapse of the body, every level is a life and death situation. He coughed up blood and was lonely. He tied a handkerchief embroidered with plum blossoms on the chimney and let it fly in the soot for sixteen years.
Until she showed up.
Zhu Ainao, the princess of the Zhou Dynasty, was a handkerchief thief, a saltpeter maker, and a pulse recorder. She went from enemy to suspicion, from suspicion to learning, from learning to resistance, and finally became the heir to the rules - not as a wife, but as a "sister", as a "craftsman", and as another lonely person.
This is a novel about technological revolution: flintlocks, rifled cannons, steam engines, breech-loading rifles, smokeless gunpowder, anesthesia surgery - every technology is not a golden finger, but the result of countless people's trial and error, sacrifice, and relay inheritance.
