Across Time: The Reform of Native Chieftains

In the twenty-eighth year of the Wanli reign (1600), the incorporation of Bozhou into the imperial county system sparks upheaval across the southwest. A modern art student, soul-shifted into the body of He Ruohai—a destitute scholar whose entire family of twenty-seven was massacred at Loushan—finds himself burdened by blood debt and a life not his own. Armed with his brush, his breadth of knowledge, and a penetrating understanding of human nature, he navigates the treacherous currents of the late Ming dynasty. He passes the imperial exams, secures a post in the local yamen, builds fortune through antiques, and lays his strategies in shadow—never resorting to brute force or empty rhetoric, but advancing step by steady step, from a refugee scribe to a pillar of the Sichuan-Guizhou borderlands. Autumn of the thirty-first Wanli year (1603). In a small courtyard of the Su family in Luzhou, a newborn cries out by a warm hearth. Su Wanqing cradles the infant in her arms, her gaze brimming with undisguised favor—she does not spare even a glance at her husband. He Ruohai, watching his wife pour all her heart into their son, feels a flicker of childish jealousy; he reaches out to gently poke the swaddling cloth and teases, "Wanqing, with such partiality... could it be that our son is heaven's chosen one?" She lifts her eyes, shoots him a defiant look, and answers with proud certainty, "Yes. He is heaven's chosen one." He Ruohai chuckles and shakes his head, attributing it to postpartum whimsy. He does not know that her words are a prophecy spanning four centuries—that Huang Shi, yet to set out from his distant time, will not step into the late Ming until fifteen years later; that twenty-seven years from now, Huang Shi will surrender to the Qing after defeat; and that fifty years hence, this swaddled infant will sit in the imperial court and pronounce judgment upon the very time-traveling traitor who fathered him.