On the sixth day of the fifth month in the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, at the Western Gardens.
The Ming emperor Zhu Youxiao fell into the water while boating and nearly died.
No one knew that when he was pulled from the water, the person who opened his eyes on the dragon bed was someone else entirely.
A soul from four hundred years in the future had transmigrated into the body of the emperor famous in history as the “Carpenter Emperor.”
The first thing he saw upon waking was Wei Zhongxian kneeling beside the bed, weeping uncontrollably. The second was a court full of officials with their own schemes, waiting for him to breathe his last. The third was his seventeen-year-old younger brother, Prince of Xin Zhu Youjian, standing among the crowd with lowered eyes, his thoughts unreadable.
The imperial treasury held only eighty thousand taels of silver. The troops in Liaodong had gone unpaid for three months. In Shaanxi, starving refugees were beginning to band together in the mountains. Jiangnan’s gentry controlled the tax revenues and refused to pay a penny. Hong Taiji of the Later Jin was sharpening his knives, waiting for the Ming to tear itself apart.
Everyone thought the ship was doomed to sink.
But Zhu Youxiao refused to accept his fate.
No silver? Then he would turn the imperial estates into experimental farms and have Xu Guangqi grow sweet potatoes. No one to fight? Then he would root out the deadwood on the capital’s garrison rolls and use the silver Wei Zhongxian had seized to train a new army. The officials were at each other’s throats? Let them fight. He would sit above them and watch, figuring out who was human and who was a demon.
Some called him a tyrant, for his confiscations had left the people of Jiangnan in a state of panic.
Some called him a wise ruler, because the soldiers in Liaodong could finally eat their fill.
And some called him a madman. Instead of sticking to carpentry, he spent all day tinkering with flintlock guns, culverins, and steam engines, and even invited those blond, blue-eyed Westerners into the palace to give lectures.
Zhu Youxiao paid them no mind. In the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, he would take the helm of this battered Ming ship himself.
As for how far it could sail…
He would just have to find out.
Transmigrated as Chongzhen: From the Start, I Slaughter My Way Through the Chaos of Late Ming
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The Ming Dynasty's Cruelest Tyrant
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Emperor Chenghua: From Crushing the Northern Tribes to an Empire Where the Sun Never Sets
Not enough Ꙩ⌵Ꙩ