The Slaughterer Duke

Transmigrating into the Great Yong Dynasty, Mu Qing inherits the title of Duke of Liaodong, only to find his father and brothers freshly slain on the battlefield. Before their bones have even cooled, the Empress Dowager and the Grand Secretariat conspire with regional governors in a deadly plot to strip the Mu family of its military power. To survive this lethal scheme, Mu Qing realizes he must embrace total destruction to forge a new path. When his enemies slander him for meeting with a princess from the hostile Northern Li kingdom during his mourning period—accusing him of abandoning his country and family in an act of supreme disloyalty and unfilial conduct—he decides to overturn the board entirely. He strikes the princess, executes a colonel, and openly defies the provincial authorities. In a final, desperate gambit, he petitions the Matriarch, assumes responsibility for eight branches of the clan, gathers his seven widowed sisters-in-law, bears the imperial edict, and carries the spirit tablets of his fallen kin to the Imperial Ancestral Temple, publicly begging the Empress Dowager to grant him death. This strategy of seeking survival through certain peril leaves the Empress Dowager furious and the Grand Secretary stunned, as one hundred thousand soldiers and a million civilians across Liaodong rally to defend the Mu residence, outraged by the injustice done to generations of martyrs. Shielded by filial piety and backed by overwhelming popular support, Mu Qing turns crisis into opportunity, reclaiming his military authority to cultivate the black soil, establish ironworks, and cast firearms. When the eastern wind finally rises and the Liaodong army enters the pass, one hundred thousand black-armored cavalry will encircle the capital, and Mu Qing will issue his ultimate decree: Today, the wicked Empress Dowager shall meet her end.