Iron-Blooded Rivers and Mountains

Shen Jun, a history graduate student, transmigrates into the body of an adopted son running a small cloth shop in Bianjing during the final years of the Northern Song Dynasty. He remembers the catastrophic outcome of the Jingkang Incident, yet the specifics remain maddeningly out of reach. He has a vague notion of how gunpowder is formulated, but his path to the right ratio is paved with one exploding furnace after another. He trains obsessively in military formations and close-quarters combat under a grizzled veteran of the Western Army, only to be told that his late start condemns him to a lifetime of mediocrity—second-rate at best. Every convenient cheat or shortcut proves unreliable. The only assets he can truly count on are the cloth shop that turns a steady profit, a contingent of garrison-farming soldiers forged from ragged refugees, and a field of wheat that has been nurtured through three decades of iron and blood. In the end, a realm is not conquered by force. It is grown.