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Zhu Youjian, a graduate student in the Department of History, has the same name as Zhu Youjian, the late Ming Chongzhen Emperor. This made him a joke among his teachers, but it also gave him an almost fatalistic obsession with the last monarch. As a scholar who has studied the Chongzhen Dynasty for more than ten years, he is very aware of the helplessness behind this period of history. He was diligent enough to rise up when the rooster crows, sleepless at night, and frugal enough to patch his dragon robe, but what Chongzhen inherited was a dynasty that was rotten to the core. Civilian officials formed cliques for private gain, military generals supported themselves with troops, natural disasters occurred one after another, and refugees flocked to the country. He had deduced countless late nights that if Chongzhen could have implemented fiscal and taxation reforms ten years earlier, if he had not killed Yuan Chonghuan, if he had decisively moved south... But history has no ifs.