When Will the Great Zhou Dynasty Move Its Capital? (Infrastructure)

Liu Ziye transmigrates into the body of a young marquis who disguises herself as a man.

Her father, the original owner's father, was the Third Prince, the late emperor's most beloved son. On his deathbed, the late emperor made the Crown Prince kneel beside him and promise never to treat the Third Prince unfairly. The Crown Prince agreed on the spot, promising to grant him the largest fief in the realm.

So after the new emperor ascended the throne, her father was dispatched to the "largest" fief: a thousand-mile stretch of frontier in the northwest.

Under the Great Zhou dynasty, a city stood every hundred li, and each city had an average of ten thousand households.

But in her father's fief, the land was vast and the population sparse. There wasn't even a decent city, and all the people together amounted to fewer than ten thousand households. When her father died of illness, the emperor stripped him of his princely title, demoted her to marquis, and made life difficult for her at every turn.

Liu Ziye looked at the atlas of her father's fief, painstakingly compiled over more than a decade from his hard-won experience, and slapped the table. "Father, you really are my father! This thousand-mile fief is an unparalleled treasure just waiting for me to uncover!"

After transmigrating, she bound herself to the [Mechanical Civilization System] and rolled up her sleeves.

Plows and agricultural machinery, looms and textile mills: get them built! Roads, vehicles, and buildings: get them up! Weapons and armor: get them made!

With the help of machinery, vast stretches of barren land were gradually reclaimed and turned into a thousand miles of fertile fields.

The roads, once so cut off that travel was almost impossible, now allowed people to reach every town in the fief within three days.

The shabby little towns grew into bustling places with tall buildings, and irrigation works reached every household, where the people lived in spacious courtyards surrounded by whitewashed brick walls.

The barbarian tribes, long-standing enemies of Great Zhou, came hoping to take advantage and plunder without lifting a finger. Instead, they were routed by roaring warplanes venting clouds of steam and dazzling iron weapons, sent fleeing in utter disarray...

The northwestern frontier gradually rose to prominence, becoming a wealthy and powerful region famed throughout Great Zhou.

The people yearned to live there, calling it "Western Capital" and eagerly moving their entire families there.

The ministers, who had watched the emperor relentlessly bully the Prince of Xiguan and had been powerless to help, biding their time, advised him: "Your Majesty, now that there is a 'Western Capital,' what need is there for Yandu? Why not move the capital?"

Hearing the rumors, the people sent petitions to the emperor every day, signed by thousands: "When exactly will the Great Zhou dynasty move its capital?"

The emperor... "You're all clearly trying to force me to abdicate!"

The ministers and the people: "So when, exactly, are you going to return the throne to the Marquis of Xiguan?"

The emperor's eyes widened in shock. "...How did you find out that the Crown Prince's position was stolen through a substitution all those years ago?!"

As heaven's movement is ever vigorous, so should women strive ceaselessly for self-improvement.

A fallen marquis rises to the top through infrastructure development.

① Infrastructure development + succession struggle + woman disguising herself as a man. She disguises herself as a man in the early and middle parts, but later it no longer matters how she dresses.

② There is a romance, but both the male lead and the male supporting characters work for the female lead's ambitions. Steampunk elements appear later.

③ The original blurb was uploaded on July 28, 2022, and a screenshot has been saved. Thanks to my friend for the cover [heart]. The blurb was written quite a while ago. The jokes and main settings remain the same, but the story itself may unfold differently.

---- Upcoming story ----

Please add my upcoming story, The Princess Who Became Feng Taihou of Northern Wei! (Infrastructure Development), to your favorites.

She woke up one day to find herself a princess of the Northern Wei imperial family.

The peerless political reformer and ultimate female lead Feng Taihou is her mother, and the five-year-old emperor on the throne is her nephew.

Wait, isn't this little emperor the famous Emperor Xiaowen?!

With a start like this, if she can't lead Northern Wei to unite the realm after a century of division, she'll...

make a laughingstock of herself.

In a word: When the nephew dies, the aunt succeeds him.

---- Upcoming story ----

Please add my upcoming story, A Village Girl Farms in Troubled Times (Infrastructure Development), to your favorites.

When Xiao Rui transmigrated into the body of an orphaned girl from a wealthy family in a small Central Plains county, the dynasty was on the eve of collapse.

History books said that in her era, "rituals had fallen apart, music was in disarray, and the people were starving."

But no one had told her that...

The collapse of ritual meant the county magistrate was leading the way in selling off government grain. The disarray of music meant bandits preyed on wedding processions.

And the moldy wheat in her family's rice jar was being eagerly devoured by mice.

The foreign cavalry would arrive in ten years?

Better deal with what was right in front of her first:

How to feed eight people with three dou of old wheat,

how to turn a barren mountainside and mass grave into a sweet potato field,

and...

how to stop that impoverished scholar who kept sneaking in to steal buns

from drooling on the relief buns she'd just steamed!

Later...

The bandit chief held a knife to her throat demanding food, only to be recruited into her bodyguard team with a bowl of hot-and-sour rice noodles.

A brilliant strategist from a poor family laughed that all she could do was farm, then turned around and came to her with sweet potatoes, begging to learn how to grow a high-yield crop.

When the cavalry trampled across the land, all of the Central Plains knew:

If you want to survive, go ask the young woman in the blue headscarf, who has a million shi of grain in storage and an undefeated army, for a bowl of hot soup.

*The true heroes of troubled times hold cooking smoke in their hands, not swords.*

*She has no dragon-slaying skills. She only knows how to make sure the people of the world have food to eat.*

Theme: As heaven's movement is ever vigorous, so should women strive ceaselessly for self-improvement.