[Farming + Revitalizing the Northeast + Feel-Good Power Fantasy]
Qin Chuan, a modern graduate student in mining, works through the night on high-intensity research and drops dead, only to transmigrate!
His soul lands in the Great Qin Dynasty, where he becomes the least conspicuous and least favored of the imperial family's nine princes.
His birth mother is lowborn and has no one to rely on. For twenty years in the palace, she has endured every indignity and yielded at every turn.
But the more he gives way, the more they bully him!
The Crown Prince is false-hearted and vicious, deliberately framing him with accusations of witchcraft and curses. His imperial father is cold and callous, standing by as events unfold. The entire court curries favor with the powerful and kicks him when he's down!
The original prince cannot clear his name and has nowhere left to turn. At last, driven to desperation, he smashes his head against a pillar in the Hall of Supreme Harmony and dies with a grievance in his heart!
More laughable still, after his death, the emperor pretends to ennoble him as a prince to conceal his reputation for forcing his son to his death, then sends him off to Ninggu Commandery beyond the passes, a place everyone avoids!
The entire court secretly mocks him: The Ninth Prince had a miserable life, and even after death his lot remains wretched. He's surely doomed!
But they could never have imagined that Qin Chuan, a mining tycoon from the modern age, can see the opportunity at a glance!
In other people's eyes: a desolate wasteland of piercing cold, barren earth, and rampant barbarians!
In Qin Chuan's eyes:
Endless black soil, enough grain to eat one's fill!
Iron and coal mines everywhere, a chance to kick-start industry and take off!
Ironworks, cement factories, gunpowder workshops, and modern farming: technology centuries ahead of the ancients!
You say the lands beyond the passes are remote and undeveloped?
Steel legions and firearms will crush the barbarians and make them bow!
Courtly power struggles and contests for the throne?
Qin Chuan spreads his hands and embraces doing nothing:
The throne? Whoever wants it can have it. I wouldn't go near it if you paid me!
From that day on, Great Qin loses a spineless prince anyone can push around and gains a powerful ruler carving out his own domain beyond the passes.
