In the eighth year of Jingtai, it was night on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month. Heavy snow sealed the Forbidden City.
The eleven-year-old deposed prince Zhu Jianshen woke up from the cold palace and stepped on the cracked blue bricks with his bare feet. He remembered that his name was Zhu Jianshen, the eighth emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who reigned for twenty-three years. History books said that he was "shrewd in his early years and indulged in personal affairs in his later years." He closed the coffin with the sentence "This is the beginning of the decline of the Ming Dynasty."
But he clearly remembered that he died in Chenghua in the 23rd year.
The moment memories of his past life came back to him, he remembered - before dawn tomorrow, Shi Heng, Xu Youzhen, Cao Jixiang, and Zhang Fu would break open the gate of Nangong and support the restoration of his father, who had been imprisoned for seven years. Then Yu Qian will be killed, the court will rot, and he will become a foolish king who will be manipulated by Concubine Wan Gui, fooled by the "paper-paste three pavilion elders", and dragged into the abyss by Xichang and the officials. Twenty-three years of imperial career were like a nightmare from which one could not wake up.
But at this moment, he still had time.
The emperor's uncle Zhu Qiyu, who was seriously ill in the Qianqing Palace, his father Zhu Qizhen who was imprisoned in the high wall of the Nangong Palace, and the four gamblers plotting a coup in the court room outside Dong'an Gate - all of them are waiting for a result. And Zhu Jianshen held the memory of his previous life in his hand, like a tempered knife.
He pushed open the door of Leng Palace and walked into the wind and snow. In this life, he doesn't want to be the foolish king who has been scolded for five hundred years. He wanted to hold on to the coup, save Yu Qian's life, secure his position as prince, and then - in twenty-three years, turn Chenghua Dynasty into a different one.
It took him two lifetimes to go from being a deposed prince in a cold palace to being an emperor for eternity.
