In the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, a bolt of lightning strikes the Forbidden City.
In the Imperial Study, seventeen-year-old Chongzhen finds a black metal tablet that can talk. Its first words are:
“Seventeen years from now, you’ll hang yourself on Coal Hill, and the Great Ming will fall.”
It calls itself Lingxi. It comes from four hundred years in the future and knows everything that will happen: who will betray him, who can save him, which battles will be lost, and which years will bring famine.
But it has one fatal flaw: its battery is its lifeline, and every use drains it. Without a network, it can survive only on cached historical records. Worst of all, every change to history renders a little more of the “future” it knows unreliable.
He takes on the eunuch faction, reforms the government, develops firearms, and fights the Qing army.
In this game, the emperor moves the pieces, and his phone is his strategist.
“I will not be an emperor who loses his country.”
