Jinyi

Jinyi is a historical time-travel novel by the web novelist Shangshan Da Laohu E, serialized on Qidian and concluded on April 4, 2022, spanning roughly 2.4574 million Chinese characters across 781 chapters (the final chapter being "All Is Well Under Heaven"); no print edition has yet appeared. The story opens when Zhang Jingyi, a modern real-estate project manager, is unexpectedly transported in spirit to the sixth year of the Tianqi reign of the Ming dynasty and wakes as the spoiled son of a deputy chiliarch of the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Unfortunately, he opens his eyes just as his father has been imprisoned by the Eastern Depot on a charge of failing to pursue the bandit "Zhao Tianwang" and may be executed at any moment. With nerve and wit, Zhang Jingyi captures the ferocious bandit and saves his father; then, seizing the chance to enter the palace as a guard, he rescues the emperor when the latter falls into the water, and from there embarks on an official career, becoming a trusted confidant of the Tianqi Emperor, Zhu Youxiao. Thereafter, as an officer of the Embroidered Uniform Guard—"clad in fish-scale robes, a Xiuchun saber at his waist"—he maneuvers through a late-dynasty court rife with eunuch factions, feuding officials, and endless partisan strife: first fighting and then allying with Wei Zhongxian and the eunuch party, while wrestling with the Donglin civil-official bloc; at the same time he promotes economic measures such as improved textile machinery, patents, and commercial taxes, reforms military affairs, and confronts the threat of the Later Jin cavalry from Liaodong. The book follows the path of "saving a collapsing heaven in a doomed age"; the protagonist has no system or cheat, and relies on a modern person's knowledge and thinking to steadily establish himself in the crumbling Tianqi court.