Late Ming, 1641: Saving the Empire from Collapse

"You claim to be the son of Prince Fu. Are you the son of Zhu Changxun, the man who weighed more than three hundred jin, was killed when the city fell, and was said to have been served up as a feast?"

"I am."

"Heh. Then why are you called Hong Youzhen?"

"Hong means red, and red is Zhu; you means 'from'; zhen means the pillar of the state. Why say more?"

The seventeenth day of the first month of the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the Year of the Metal Snake.

At that time, Li Zicheng had taken Yongning and was besieging Luoyang, throwing Henan into turmoil;

Zhang Xianzhong had taken Xiangyang, killed the Prince of Xiang, and swept through Huguang;

the Qing army had just taken Songshan and Jinzhou. The Ming had lost its finest troops from the Nine Frontiers, and the lands beyond the passes were no longer Ming territory.

As for the future, when the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself at Coal Hill;

when Li Zicheng declared himself emperor in Xi'an;

when the Qing army entered the passes and established its capital in Yanjing later that same year;

those were not things Hong Youzhen, trapped in Luoyang and besieged by Li Zicheng, could afford to think about.

"Hey, hey, hey, I've been here for months, and I really don't have a System! When Luoyang falls, how am I supposed to survive?"

Years later, Yanjing was pacified, and the ancestral temples restored.

Hong Youzhen ascended the steps in imperial robes and crown, offering sacrifices to the late emperor and his ancestors. His voice resounded through heaven and earth.

"I, humble though I am, have inherited the ancestral rites of the Great Ming and succeeded to the throne!"