Rewrite the Nuclear War and Unite the World

In 2060, nuclear war burned civilization from the surface of the Earth. The surviving humans huddled in underground shelters and traced the catastrophe to its roots: nations divided, an endless arms race, and finally, humanity’s own destruction. To sever the chain of cause and effect that had led to this fate, humanity launched the all-or-nothing “Return to One, Return to the Source Plan.” They had only two chances to project their consciousness across time, with no physical objects to take along. Failure meant there would be no second try. Two elite members of the Doomsday Training Camp, Zhu Yan and Zhu Heng, were close friends who had shared life and death for more than a decade. Together, they set out across time. Zhu Yan arrived in the early years of the Jiajing reign and took over the body of a member of the imperial clan, building everything from scratch. He introduced high-yield crops to end famine, built water-powered workshops, trained a new army equipped with modern firearms, quelled border threats, and constructed mighty ocean-going ships. After decades of painstaking effort, he forced the Ming dynasty into an age of prosperity. He drafted a plan to conquer the world, but the limits of his era left it conservative and riddled with flaws. Years of shouldering the burden also exhausted his lifespan. Decades passed in the blink of an eye. Zhu Heng’s consciousness arrived, taking over the body of a seventeen-year-old adopted son of the Eastern Palace and making him the Crown Prince of the Ming dynasty. The brothers who once fought side by side in bloodshed had, overnight, become father and son in name, as well as sovereign and subject. As Emperor Cen Yan lay dying, his strength spent, he entrusted Lu Heng with the full treasury, a million-strong modern army, a hundred ocean-going ships, a trove of global intelligence, and even the blueprints for the Newcomen steam engine, whose limitations had yet to be overcome. All he left behind was an unfinished draft for conquest, waiting for his old friend to refine it and unite the world.