Great Ming: My Father Is a Treacherous Minister, and I Was a Rebel in My Past Life

In the autumn of the twenty-ninth year of the Jiajing reign, Yan Shifan jolted awake from a nightmare.

His father, Yan Song, looked up at him. He knew that look: gentle, shrewd, with the corners of his mouth slightly raised. He had seen it before, on Li Linfu’s face in the Tang Dynasty. His father was Li Linfu, the man he had feared most in his previous life. Neither of them said it aloud, but they both knew: the other recognized who they were.

He decided to keep a low profile and just make it through this life. But he soon realized that there wasn’t a single normal person at court: Xu Jie carried the weary air of someone who had signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki; Hai Rui had the stubbornness of someone who had seen reform fail; Zhang Juzheng looked like someone who had failed to usurp the throne; Qi Jiguang seemed to have been tortured by a thousand cuts; Hu Zongxian gave the impression of having switched sides over and over; Lü Fang looked like he had made seven voyages to the Western Seas; and Prince Yu seemed to have forgotten his home in the pleasures of a foreign land. Stranger still, he kept having the same dream: a place with no color or shape, where nine figures stood in the void, facing one another in their true forms.

He didn’t know that those “indescribable instincts” came from a sealed modern soul. He didn’t know that Jiajing, an old monster who had lived for two thousand years, had summoned them with an immortal pill, simply to watch a group of sinners nailed to history’s pillar of shame struggle in dire straits. Could they prolong the Ming Dynasty by a hundred years? Could they make him believe that the struggle itself had meaning?

All he knew was that he had to learn to stand firm amid the tug-of-war between three personalities. He thought he was repairing a wall, never realizing that the wall would become a seed. When he pushed open Jiajing’s door, he said one thing.

This is a story of a “traitor’s son” and the “soul of a rebel” using the vilest reputations to do the purest deeds, planting seeds in the gaps between the lines of history until a trickle became a river.