My Best Friend Founds a Nation, I Lose Mine

Irreverent blurb:

He transmigrated into the role of a fallen kingdom's princess, a beauty so stunning that hostile foreigners fought over her... except he was the princess's father, a prince who had taken his own life after being humiliated when his country fell and his family was destroyed.

The Jida people had their cavalry poised to strike. How could he avoid being taken prisoner?

He hid his sharp wits up his sleeve, carefully played along, developed production, and worked hard at farming.

But why were the Jida people's looks getting more and more strange? Wait, what exactly was the humiliation that made him take his own life?

A mad emperor obsessed with having his younger brother was closing in. How could he avoid becoming the emperor's kept lover?

He spent his days in a Taoist temple, focused on inventing, a half-hearted Taoist who had renounced worldly desires.

But why was the emperor getting more and more perverted?

Someone in the Central Plains raised a rebellion. Looking closer, he realized his once-devoted friend was the rebel leader and the future new emperor.

Well, could he still get down on his knees and surrender?

Only after an old acquaintance, lost in a web of misunderstandings, imprisoned him in a tiny space did he finally understand.

The princess might not be his biological child, but they were exactly alike in their nature as a fallen kingdom's caged songbirds.

Really, it's a story about a caged songbird with a fallen-kingdom fate working hard to farm and build up an alternate dynasty.

Serious blurb:

Zhao Ziyu and Yang Shi transmigrated into an alternate dynasty. They originally planned to use modern knowledge to make a fortune and spend their lives in pastoral bliss in a strange era without steel, noise, or light pollution. Then their identities were exposed. Zhao Ziyu, a member of the imperial family, was taken back to the capital, while the authorities covered their tracks by burning down their former utopia.

Yang Shi escaped death, only to be framed and sentenced to penal servitude in Xiangzhou.

If there was no withered branch that could shelter a butterfly afraid to spread its wings, then he would simply burn the dead wood and soar like an eagle. Thus, the agricultural scientist, left with nowhere to turn, raised his voice in the Liang Dynasty, a land filled with starving corpses and beset by internal and external crises. The lives of the two transmigrators then split onto separate paths.

In this strange era, Zhao Ziyu was both an imperial scion and a caged bird, repeatedly suspected yet still pleading for the people. He was both the new ruler's old friend and a surrendered official of the new dynasty.

Years later, on the night the city fell, Yang Shi looked at the former dynasty's prince as he left the city to offer his surrender. "There was a passage from Mencius in our childhood textbook. Do you remember what it was?"

Zhao Ziyu remembered it to the marrow.

Back then, along with an imperial decree promising high office and handsome rewards, Yang Shi had flung a cold remark into the face of Zhao Ziyu, who had been ordered to negotiate their surrender: "A bowl of rice or a bowl of soup can mean life or death. If offered with a shout, even a passerby would refuse it; if kicked over and offered, even a beggar would disdain it."

"...Yet people accept ten thousand measures of grain without regard for propriety or righteousness. What does a fortune like that do for me? If you want to call me greedy for wealth and status, you don't have to beat around the bush."

"I wasn't entirely insulting you. Truly." The new ruler came through the snow at midnight and placed a freshly peeled orange segment in the prisoner's hand. "I also like the opening line of that passage."

I desire what I desire in fish.

Theme: Even in a foreign world, strive to bring the people a better life.