In 1912, Lu Dingchuan spent his entire family fortune on an appointment as magistrate of Qingyuan County, bought in the provincial capital.
On his first day in office, bandits block the road outside the county seat. The Ma Gang’s flag flies above the city walls, and his predecessor’s bones are barely cold.
His elderly servant trembles with fear. “Young master, let’s go home.”
Lu Dingchuan stays. Because something new has appeared in his mind: a Military Industry Simulation System.
Other people buy official posts to line their pockets. He buys one to start from scratch. The System gives him blueprints far ahead of their time, but he has to seize the raw materials himself, recruit the workers himself, and fight for territory himself.
No heavenly army comes to his rescue, and nothing happens overnight. He starts out at an abandoned coal mine, recruits Meng Lie, a defeated commander whose men are starving to death, turns railway tracks into his first batch of weapons, and captures his first stronghold in a night raid.
Then, in just three years, he silences one warlord after another, including those who once mocked him as a “bookish fool who bought his way into office.”
This is not a story about a “chosen one sweeping all before him.”
It is the story of an ordinary man in a brutal age, using his wits, his courage, and a pair of hands stained with machine oil to carve out a place for himself.
From Qingyuan County to all of Fengtian, from being hunted down to making others take the long way around him
It takes Lu Dingchuan ten years.
And it all begins with an official seal he bought for 380 silver dollars on a winter day in 1912.
