Programmer Lin Xiaotian died suddenly after working overtime. When he opened his eyes, he had become a junior officer in a frontier army in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen's reign. His ten subordinates were starving, their eyes green with hunger. Beyond the garrison village stretched a famine-stricken wasteland, while within Xuanfu Garrison corrupt officers bled the troops dry and pocketed pay for nonexistent soldiers. And in his mind was a knockoff System, apparently made by his former employer, complete with a countdown to his death: the Ming dynasty would fall in 112 days.
The System said it needed an Industrial Revolution to save the Ming dynasty. Looking at the starving wretches and rusty blades before him, Lin Xiaotian wanted to curse. Save the dynasty? He should start by saving his own stomach!
No food? Using gunpowder formulas centuries ahead of their time, he "persuaded" hoarders to "voluntarily" hand over their grain. No iron? Alongside Shen Lian'er, the blacksmith's daughter among the refugees, he lit a primitive furnace in a drafty, ramshackle shed. No soldiers? Through a series of bloody battles that came close to gambling with his life, he hammered the numb refugees into hardened troops who wouldn't blink at the sight of blood.
The gunpowder evolved from a "beggar's version" to a granulated formula. Iron tubes that "broke after one shot" became matchlocks capable of firing again and again. Their defenses advanced from earthen walls and wooden stakes to bastions and minefields. The Hu family's private soldiers, the rotten troops of the garrison, and the desperadoes hired beyond the passes... all were blown to pieces by this incomprehensible art of "iron and fire."
But Lin Xiaotian knew the real crisis wasn't the local strongmen. On the System's mission panel, the words [The Foundation for Survival] loomed over him like a thorn in his side: gather a thousand people within sixty days, train three hundred elite soldiers, stockpile half a month's food, and establish stable weapons production. Warnings about historical correction values flashed incessantly, and a mysterious being called the "Observer" seemed to have set its sights on him.
