Lin Yuan, a history graduate student, was reading the History of Ming at the Nanjing Library when he noticed four pencil-written characters in the margin of Zhu Yuanzhang’s biography: “She shouldn’t have died.” After a dizzy spell, he opened his eyes to find himself standing on the streets of Haozhou in the twelfth year of the Zhizheng era.
This was the territory of Guo Zixing’s Red Turban Army, and the soldier asking him whether he would enlist was named Tang He.
Lin Yuan realized he had transmigrated to a turning point that would shape the next six hundred years of Chinese history. The reason he had come here was hidden in those four penciled characters: Ma Xiuying, the empress whose story the historical records could no longer explain after the fifteenth year of Hongwu. What had happened before her death?
From stitching wounds with salt water in the wounded soldiers’ camp, to climbing a cliff to launch a surprise attack and wipe out the bandits at Black Wind Stronghold, to improving black powder and blasting through Dingyuan’s city defenses, Lin Yuan steadily carved out a place for himself amid the chaos. But he had only one true goal: to marry Ma Xiuying before Zhu Yuanzhang did.
Sieges, landslides, and intercepting a poisoned blade. When Ma Xiuying declared “I choose Lin Yuan” in front of a hall full of generals, the gears of history began to turn off course. And on a barren slope outside the city, Zhu Yuanzhang left behind just one sentence:
“You owe me a life. Ma Xiuying’s life.”
