A modern overworked corporate drone, forced to work nine to nine and six days a week, drops dead from exhaustion. He is reborn as an orphan in Huai Xi at the end of the Yuan dynasty. Near death, he is saved by a reclusive old Taoist and spends eight years cultivating deep in the mountains. The old Taoist pours his heart and soul into putting him through relentless training, personally teaching him five peerless disciplines: divine medicine, battlefield swordsmanship, formation-breaking spear techniques, archery accurate to a hundred paces, and innate Taoist inner cultivation. Gifted beyond measure, the protagonist fuses ancient and modern knowledge, mastering every art to perfection.
His only reason for descending the mountain is to repay Empress Ma for saving his life with two steamed buns amid the chaos of war, and to defy fate by preventing her death in the fifteenth year of Hongwu. From there, the story follows him as he persuades Zhu Yuanzhang to end the killing, cures Crown Prince Zhu Biao’s chronic illness, rescues the eldest princess from drowning and is chosen as her consort, discovers a massive coal deposit on the princess’s fief, joins forces with the crown prince to establish the Imperial Coal Company, provides work relief to settle displaced people and support the poor throughout the land, opens a new school of practical studies to educate children from humble families, and takes on five unsuccessful scholars as personal disciples for three years. All five disciples then place at the top of the imperial examinations, astonishing the court with their literary and military prowess. Their school of master and disciples establishes a century of honest governance in the Ming dynasty, completely rewriting the blood-soaked course of the Hongwu era and ushering in an age of peace and prosperity for the people, unmatched through the ages.
