The Ming Selection Register: Six Generations of Military Merit to Temper My Fate

[Historically researched] [No System] [Garrison families] [A family saga] [A state built on paperwork] From the Jiajing to the Wanli era, the garrison system fell apart as the battalion army system rose. The Ministry of War's Office of Military Selection undertook a massive revision of the Register of Military Appointments, checking military records and merit tallies against one another. Countless hereditary military families were ruined by the paper trail. Across six generations, the Song family of Pingyue Guard in Guizhou endured a turbulent fate. Their founder fought north in the Jingnan campaign and slew enemy generals; the second generation fought a bloody battle at Duyun; the third generation was promoted through routine appointment. But a fire in the archives during the Chenghua era destroyed the original records of their merits. Then an official directive retroactively revoked those routine promotions across generations, sending the Song family into a precipitous decline, all the way down to the rank of junior banner officer. The sixth-generation heir, Song Chengye, found himself trapped in a sea of bloodshed in Bozhou. Faced with the ironclad rule that killing three enemies merited only one recorded achievement, and the temptation to bribe the officials investigating military merits, he flatly refused to falsify the records. When a military blade could no longer save his family, he took up brush and ink, devoting his life to copying the family Register of Military Appointments, carving an enduring memory for his family beneath a merciless system.