The Fifteenth Year of the Late Ming Dynasty

Senior high school history teacher Shen Lie corrected 120 papers and fell asleep on the table. When he woke up, he was lying behind the imperial desk in Qianqing Palace. Wearing a bright yellow dragon robe, he held a dried cinnabar brush in his hand. Kneeling in front of him was a middle-aged eunuch who was crying and called him "Long live the Lord". Chongzhen fifteen years. March fifteenth. Songshan has just broken. Hong Chengchou had just been captured. Liaodong's 130,000 elite troops were all gone. The national treasury is less than 400,000 taels. Kaifeng was besieged. Li Zicheng was in Henan, and Huang Taiji was outside the pass. There are still two years until this body is hanged from the locust tree in Meishan. He is not a genius. He doesn't know how to make muskets, how to prepare gunpowder, and how to draw blast furnace blueprints. His only golden finger was a high school history test that he had taught for six years - why the Ming Dynasty perished, why Sun Chuanting died in Tongguan, and when Li Zicheng invaded Beijing. But it is one thing to have standard answers printed on the exam paper. It's another thing to sit on the throne and watch the memorials pile up, the candles burn into oil, and everyone in the civil and military circles waiting for you to give orders. What's even more troublesome is: he knows the outcome, but every time he tries to change something, this machine that has been running for more than two hundred years uses its own inertia to wear away his strength inch by inch. "This question should be analyzed from the institutional level, not just natural disasters." Now he doesn't have to analyze. He is that institutional level.