In the twelfth year of Shaoxing, snow from Fengbo Pavilion fell on the flagstones of Lin’an and did not melt for three days.
Yue Fei was dead. Yue Yun was dead. The old soldiers of the Yue Family Army were like leaves swept away by the autumn wind, one by one locked up in the Dali Temple prison.
Shen Huai, seventeen, an officer in Yue Yun’s personal guard, was one of them.
But the moment he opened his eyes, he was no longer the original Shen Huai.
Gu Yan, twenty-nine, a PhD in Song, Liao, and Jin history and a master’s in materials engineering. No System, no cheats, only a mind full of knowledge from nine hundred years in the future.
Dysentery raged through the prison, but he survived by boiling water in a pot. The scholars at court were at a loss, but he used an iron-smelting blueprint to unlock Jiangnan’s iron industry. Enemy cavalry pressed in on the battlefield, but he used a production line to build crossbow artillery the enemy had never seen before.
From condemned prisoner to soldier, from soldier to general, from general to the throne through abdication, he did not take the realm of the Zhao Song dynasty. He restored the backbone of a people bent beneath the words “an accusation made up out of thin air.”
