The Ming Dynasty's Final Campaign Against the Qing

In the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen reign, 1644, disaster struck the Ming.

The Ming emperor hanged himself on Coal Hill, and Dorgon’s iron cavalry smashed through Shanhai Pass. The Central Plains fell, and China stood on the brink of the bloody massacres of Yangzhou and Jiading.

Su Ce crawled out from a heap of corpses, carrying a ruthless soul from the future. He retreated to a desolate island in Bohai Bay. He would not prop up the Southern Ming, nor would he kneel to the Qing and shave his head. In this age when human lives were worth no more than blades of grass, he believed in just one rule: truth is always within the range of the cannons.

He made the island his base, fired up the blast furnaces, baked cement, and cut rifling into gun barrels. He sank five hundred traitor warships in a minefield. Flying a false Western flag, he sailed upriver in clipper ships that outclassed their time, snatching Jiangnan’s last craftsmen and men of letters from beneath the Qing’s executioners’ blades.

From grain powder to rifled muskets, from swift sailing ships to steam-powered ironclads belching black smoke.

Su Ce had no use for benevolence or righteousness. He wielded the coldest laws of physics and chemistry to crush feudal empires of the agricultural age with overwhelming technological superiority. With the steel torrent of heavy industry, he would grind the supposedly invincible Eight Banners cavalry into a pulp and flatten the old world’s monarchy and barbarism for good.

“My name is Su Ce. I am the gravedigger of the Qing.”