The seventh year of the Tianqi era, November.
When Shen Yan woke up, he had become Zhu Youjian, who had just ascended the throne. The imperial robes were real, the throne was real, and so was the noose on Coal Hill waiting to take his life a dozen years later. It wasn't something he could simply forget.
At present, Wei Zhongxian was on his way to Fengyang, having been sent away. Court officials were scrambling to purge the eunuch faction, Liaodong needed military funds, and Shaanxi needed grain to survive. Everyone praised the new emperor's wisdom, yet few of the memorials brought before him offered any peace of mind.
Shen Yan decided to make sure he stayed alive first.
So a man who should have died was secretly kept alive, while the Imperial Guard and secret police, once fallen from favor, were given assignments again. A young military officer was ordered west to investigate grain carts crossing the frontier, while an overlooked manufacturing bureau received an uninvited visitor: the emperor himself.
Auditing accounts, training troops, collecting commercial taxes, and clearing land records: disputes at court gradually led to the trade routes of Jiangnan, the military provisions of the Nine Frontiers, and the estates of princely households across the land. The old ministers had their own schemes, and the newcomers might not obey forever either. He remembered who had once been loyal and brave, and who later defected and surrendered, but gradually discovered that when fate changed, people changed with it.
From the capital to Liaodong, from the northwest to the coast, there was more and more he needed to do, but not necessarily more people willing to let him get it done.
This time, can Zhu Youjian live to see a spring that does not require him to end up on Coal Hill?
