The day Chongzhen hanged himself, our group chat of five hundred transmigrators was still bragging.
When I opened my eyes, Beijing had fallen. The System gave me three choices: restore the Ming, surrender to the Qing, or build my own regime. The first two came with free protective charms. Building my own meant starting from scratch.
Me, the king of armchair politics, a high school senior who only knew how to play games, chose the third option.
From then on, I treated the chaos at the end of the Ming dynasty like a game to conquer: the five-hundred-member group chat became my intelligence network and battlefield for trash talk, a mystic girl who could read qi and ley lines became my eyes, and my street-smart buddies took the hits for me. Matchlocks, feng shui, and a modern mind: I had a cure for every kind of defiance.
Shen Ke said I was defying heaven. He surrendered to the Qing and became their dog, while I built my own regime and remained a man. He wanted to be a compliant subject of history. I was determined to be its master.
Pacify Liaodong in three years? I won't need three.
Give me a broken valley, and I'll give you a China.
