The Entire Court Says I've Gone Mad

On the twenty-fourth day of the eighth month in the seventh year of the Tianqi era, Chongzhen's enthronement ceremony took place. The young emperor on the dragon throne looked at the assembled court officials, with only one thought in his mind: I don't have much time left. Ma Lixiang, a highly educated modern man, transmigrated into Chongzhen. The day he ascended the throne was the start of the countdown to the fall of the Great Ming. The entire court said the new emperor had gone mad: instead of killing Wei Zhongxian, he kept him on as a deniable agent; instead of suppressing the Donglin faction, he pushed its members into business. No one knew that he came from three hundred years in the future and knew all too well that the Little Ice Age, the Later Jin cavalry, and the peasant rebellions could each bring down the dynasty. He surveyed farmland, opened maritime trade, improved firearms, established workshops, developed steam power, and built railways. Using eunuchs as his blade, the Donglin faction as his abacus, and technology as his foundation, he would drag a dying feudal dynasty into the industrial age. He reclaimed Liaodong, sailed around the globe, colonized the New World, and launched rockets into the sky. He spent his life creating an unprecedented new era for the Great Ming. But when he awoke in a modern hospital bed and frantically searched through the history of the Ming dynasty, he discovered that the crooked tree on Coal Hill was still there on the nineteenth day of the third month in the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen era. History had not changed at all.