1860, Vienna. A twelve-year-old boy was ridiculed for his surname Metternich. He takes refuge in the family's abandoned garden, which is overgrown with thorny wild roses. He envied them—no one appreciated them, yet they lived so savagely.
It was a metaphor for his life.
In the next fourteen years, he took what everyone regarded as a "detour":
· In Zurich, he solved the equation that amazed the professors, but received the news that his father had died of illness.
· In the Bohemian mines, he recorded the hours of child labor and also calculated the "attrition rate" of the system's corruption.
· In the port of Trieste, he traced smuggled arms and saw clearly the veins of the empire's gray trade.
· On the Danube front, he was shot in the abdomen, had his spleen removed, and was judged to be "permanently disabled."
His family said he was crazy and had thrown his noble career into the mud.
Only a few people know:
The mine failure warning he wrote allowed the General Administration to adjust its plan two years in advance;
The model of port surveillance he designed is still used by Naval Intelligence today;
The dry river route he discovered saved a regiment on the battlefield.
In 1874, he lay in a military hospital, his body broken and his future ruined.
It was at this time that those authorities who had regarded him as an "abnormal" began to quietly wait for the piece of paper from the medical committee announcing his retirement.
Because as long as he is no longer a soldier, they can "legally" recruit the most scarce brain in the empire: one that can use mathematical modeling and understand the coal ash in the mines, the ink stains in the port, and the blood stains on the battlefield.
And he himself, between resisting retirement and physical limits, between the desire to be "useful" and the fear of being "instrumentalized", began the loneliest struggle.
Until he entered the Imperial Bureau of Mining and Industry and rose to deputy director with his strength.
Until he met Crown Prince Rudolf, who was ten years younger than him - a young man who had different political views from him but made him see another possibility.
Until he discovered that the auditor Goldman, whom he had "encountered" by chance since Zurich, seemed to be hiding another identity...
[Quotes in the text]
· "Compassion is not the kindness of a woman, but a kind of divinity caused by having good thoughts towards the world and not wanting to see the suffering of others. The almost natural compassion is never a hindrance to the forge ahead, but allows him to have a nearly rational and humane judgment, so that he can understand the overall situation, have ambitions but no evil thoughts, and have desires but not get lost. Under this, people are more inclined to give than to plunder."
"I chose to enter the cast iron furnace not to become a weapon, but to understand how the weapon is cast, how to use it, and how to twist the user's hand. Only by understanding the casting process can I design different molds in the future. But now, I must first become a qualified piece of cast iron. This means accepting forging, accepting quenching, and accepting that I temporarily lose my 'human' shape and become the shape that the system needs. This is the 'necessary sacrifice' I chose for myself. And the price will not be fully revealed until a long time later."
[The author has something to say]
This is a story about genius, choice and price.
There are no cheats, just real-world gravity and friction.
The protagonist is not perfect, or even "correct," but he spends his life answering a question: When the system is destined to collapse, how should individuals deal with themselves?
Should you go with the flow, fight hard, or after understanding everything, silently guard the last light?
Reading Guide/Demining
1. It's not a time travel, it's not a systematic novel. The protagonist is a home-grown genius who relies on hard-core IQ to survive in the cracks of the empire.
2. Strong/sapiosexual/extreme pulling. The protagonist is sickly but mentally strong, and the CP line is hidden between calculation and betrayal. It is the fatal bond of "I will spy on you for half your life, and I will pay for it in the end."
3. Textual research leads to historical fantasy. The background draws on the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, with solid details and a full sense of atmosphere.
4. Slowly warms up but has great staying power. The early stage of the plot is long, the characters are delicately created, and the power game and emotional explosion in the middle and late stages are extremely powerful.
5. The protagonist's body is really weak, but his mind is really strong. This is the type that can use mathematics to change the situation of the battle even from the hospital bed.
Welcome to the dusk of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witness a soul blooming immortal flowers in the ruins.
Concept: A genius with divine compassion uses reason to dissect every crack in the twilight of the empire, struggling between self-instrumentation and human dignity. When his body is broken and all parties covet his mind, he must choose: to become the sharpest calculating tool in the hands of power, or to draw the final bottom line for human value and dignity in the collapsed old world.