The Late Ming Dynasty Started with a Broken Gun

[The author graduated in 1985 in China and has a PhD from a Top 30 university in the United States. The professional direction involves historical and strategic analysis] In July of the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, Xu Yuan, a hereditary household in Yingzhou, was stabbed to death from behind by his subordinates while suppressing bandits in Beixiang. On the same night, the 17-year-old only son Xu Mu woke up from a coma with high fever for three days. His soul had been replaced by a 27-year-old retired special forces soldier with a master's degree in history. When he woke up, there were only three old servants, seven buckets of rice, twenty-three taels of broken silver and his father's thin-skinned coffin left in the house. The first thing he did after waking up was that the bank lawyer came to blackmail him for thirty-six taels of silver, but he turned him away with three words. The second thing was to take Ding from Dao Scar's hometown twenty miles north to collect six acres of land that had been cultivated by local powerful men for eight years. The third thing was to pass by the massacred Wangjiazhai, kill the bandits who cleared the area, and carry back the nineteen survivors. The fourth thing was to find a suicide note in the secret room of his father's study. My father spent ten years sharpening a gun, and it was the first usable flintlock gun in the Ming Dynasty. He knew that Li Zicheng would conquer Luoyang six months later. Four years later Chongzhen died in Meishan. Five years later, Yangzhou was massacred for ten days. But what he has to do now is to withstand a group of bandits within five days and save the twenty-four people who follow him surnamed Xu. Every account is correct. Every battle has a price. Everyone who follows him will go from living to trusting him to dying for him. Start with a shot.