[Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms + Farming + Iron-Blooded Nation-Building + Punish Traitorous States + Restore the Han Dynasty]
In the final years of the Later Tang, the realm lies in ruins. The warlords treat the people like two-legged sheep, while Shi Jingtang plans to offer the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun to the Khitan and recognize the enemy as his father!
Yang Qing, a modern master's graduate in military engineering, transmigrates into the body of Youzhou's number-one spoiled heir and finds himself trapped from the start in a deadly honey trap at the Military Governor's Office.
The great clans pressure him to surrender military power?
He accepts a marriage agreement and volunteers to be exiled to Xinzhou, the most bitterly cold frontier stronghold!
The court withholds his grain and pay, while powerful clans blockade the trade routes?
He refines the priceless "Youzhou Snow" and brews "Burning Knife" liquor at sixty proof, making princes and nobles in Jiangnan and Luoyang kneel with gold in hand, begging to buy his goods.
Then he builds waterworks and expands farmland in the frontier, fires bricks, opens blast furnaces, forges famed steel swords, and constructs divine-arm crossbows, turning a frigid border garrison into an impregnable steel city!
On New Year's Eve, he launches a surprise attack on the royal encampment. At Wild Horse Spring, fire engulfs the enemy camps, and in Youzhou's barbican fortress, he wipes out ten thousand Khitan Imperial Guards!
With a single letter, he plays the Ten Kingdoms against one another:
He sells warhorses to Southern Tang, helps Wuyue plot for the throne, challenges the Khitan to war, and treats the emperor in Luoyang like a fool!
In the third year of Qingtai, Taiyuan is under siege. Cut off from Khitan reinforcements and with nowhere left to turn, Shi Jingtang sends a blood-written letter to the nineteen-year-old Yang Qing, offering three prefectures of Hedong and swearing to become his adopted son!
Yang Qing instead has the surrender petition and blood letter circulated throughout the Ten Kingdoms, then leads fifty thousand Black-Armored Cavalry to the walls of Taiyuan. In front of the envoys from every kingdom, he raises his saber and shouts coldly:
"Shi Jingtang! Back then, you wanted to offer Yanyun to the Hu and call their chief your father. Now the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun are all in my hands. Are you truly willing to come out of the city, kneel, and worship me as your father?!"
In the past, the Hu raided south for plunder. From this day on, the tide has turned! If the enemy can come, so can I!
