Transmigrating to Rome: The Emperor's Path

In the first century AD, the Roman Empire is mired in turmoil. Li Xi, a modern man who transmigrates into the body of a dying, retired centurion, faces a desperate situation: his wife is dead, his daughter is sick, and loan sharks are hunting him down. He shoulders sacks of grain aboard Egyptian cargo ships and earns a few hard-won copper coins on the docks of the Tiber. His faded scarlet cloak is a relic of past glory. His fortunes turn when a Syrian merchant ship leaves behind some sugarcane pulp. Li Xi sets up an iron pot in an abandoned bathhouse and uses distillation to boil it down into glistening sugar crystals. When a sugar sculpture of Venus makes a dazzling appearance at a senator’s birthday feast, Rome’s aristocrats go mad for sweets. The enormous profits invite a nighttime attack, but hidden crossbows in the walls turn the tables. In the moonlight, caramel and blood mingle in a grotesque scene. Li Xi seizes the opportunity to win over Senator Claudius and uncovers ironclad evidence that his political enemies are colluding with the enemy. On the night the emperor dies suddenly, he leads three hundred veterans to seize the Tiber’s grain warehouses, then drives his short sword through the golden cuirass of the Praetorian Guard commander. When the Gallic legions change sides, the trembling Senate presents him with a purple-and-gold sash. At the coronation, sunlight from the Pantheon falls across a map dusted with sugar. His daughter’s Sabine headscarf glows beside his purple robes. Stroking the original owner’s rusted soldier’s dog tag, the new emperor listens as the sugar mills boil slaves’ blood and sweat into golden crystals. This empire, forged from honey and steel, has enemy bones beneath its throne. Currents stir beneath the Tiber, and the new Rome born of this sweet revolution is forging slavery and the iron laws of capital into an even more ruthless machine of rule.