Collapse: I Know Everyone’s Ending

In the winter of the eleventh year of the Chongzhen era, Qiantun Guard in Liaodong fell. When Lu Chen, a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences, woke up, he found himself lying in a corpse cart. They had picked him up, thinking he was dead. He was barefoot, wearing a ragged padded coat, with no blade or armor. A slash on his right shoulder had frozen over. Corpses surrounded him. Qing scouts were in the distance, and Qiantun Guard was still burning behind him. But in his mind lay every step of the next six years: The Battle of Songjin, where the entire Ming army of 130,000 was wiped out. The fall of the Ming in the Jia Shen year, when the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself at Coal Hill. The forced queue and change of clothing, the Yangzhou massacre, the Jiading massacres. Two hundred and sixty-eight years. He had three years until Songjin and six until the fall of the Ming. Starting as a low-ranking banner officer with nothing, he would hold up this collapsing empire.