I Revive the Great Ming by Collecting Scrap

Three days before the capital fell, Zhu Mo transmigrated into the body of the Chongzhen Emperor.

What a mess. The worst possible start. Zhu Mo was numb!

Then he thought it over: Back in the day, the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang started with nothing but a bowl. At least Zhu Mo had a city, even if it seemed on the verge of falling.

The treasury was so empty even the rats would cry, but the city still had a population of a million and a garrison of over a hundred thousand. The nobles, civil officials, and eunuchs had hundreds of millions of taels of silver in their homes, if the amounts extorted by Li Zicheng were anything to go by. The imperial city and the Forbidden City still held three hundred years' worth of treasures. Surely that was better than starting with a bowl.

So Zhu Mo stayed. Since Chongzhen had disappeared and Zhu Mo looked just like him, he would shoulder this burden as a descendant of the Zhu family, travel between two worlds, and rebuild the Ming Dynasty with his own scrapyard.

From that day on, a new Ming Dynasty rose to prominence, starting with one city and unifying the Blue Star.

The Ming Dynasty was rotten to the core, and the taxes weren't coming in, so he abolished them all.

The palace had plenty of antiques, so he put them up for auction and used the proceeds to buy modern food and industrial silver to pay salaries and military wages. The civil officials and gentry who depended on land donations went mad. The peasants demanded their land back.

The military farming garrisons were all rotten, so he disbanded them. The military households became civilian households, and the officers went mad when their free slaves were gone.

The camp troops kept losing because they weren't getting paid. A Ming army with its full wages paid was unbeatable.

If the rebels of Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong slaughtered the gentry, that wasn't his problem. They didn't pay taxes, yet expected him to protect them? Dream on.

At some point, the world began to change.

The whole world was closed to the seas! Not even a single plank could be launched, or airships would sink it without exception.

After the Ming Dynasty successfully industrialized, no one else could industrialize. The market was already saturated.

Emperor Shengzu of Ming! His name would shine across this timeline.