Guardian of the Ming Dynasty's Lifeline

When I opened my eyes, I was putting my neck through a white silk noose.

Outside stood the assembled court, the great clans, and the sects...

They hadn't come to save the emperor. They were waiting for me to die.

The nineteenth day of the third month, in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen.

Coal Hill.

An old locust tree.

The history books say the Ming fell on this day.

But they don't know that buried in the tree's rings is a causal anchor from three years ago.

Braille is carved into the inside of the noose.

Someone had laid the path for me, and taken nineteen years of karmic burden off my shoulders.

To whoever comes after me, take my place and hate them.

Hate whom?

The sects that forced the palace coup, the great clans that cut off the army's pay...

The seven Daoist lineages that treated the dragon vein like a feast, waiting for me to die so they could carve it up.

And the dragon beneath the earth, unfed for three hundred years, so starved it had forgotten how to hate.

It asked me: Did you come to fulfill our pact, or to deceive me?

I don't know.

I only know that from the day they carried me down from Coal Hill, everyone expected me to die again.

Lin Youdun knelt at the tent entrance, waiting for my first command.

Qian Qianyi wrote eight elegies, and got the rhyme wrong in every one.

The Treasury Pavilion couldn't calculate my fate because my ledger didn't belong to this age.

And the dragon vein said: You carry his scent.

That was the only card I had to play.

The card that said, “I won't run.”

And so I survived from the fourth month of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen until the second month of the following year.

I didn't die.

I ended up owing the dragon vein a mountain of fingernail debts.

In return, I got this from an old soldier of the capital garrison: “Then we'll hold out for another three months.”

That was enough.

Hold out for three months first.

Who knows what comes after that.