Dingge

Dingge is a historical time-travel novel by the Yuewen author Qingche Duwei, serialized on Qidian and classified under "History: Song, Yuan, and Ming." It opens in Changmao Village, Mizhi County, northern Shaanxi, during the Chongzhen reign: years of drought have left no harvest, and villagers eat white stone powder until their bellies swell and they die, selling their children for a single bushel of wheat. Tang Wubing, a modern man, travels back in time and becomes a xiucai of high seniority in the village. He has no system and no supernatural cheat; his only advantages are his foreknowledge of late-Ming history and the judgment he draws from sources such as Beilue of the Late Ming, Records of the Rogues, the Chongzhen Compendium, and the Veritable Records of the Ming. The story begins at a dead end: he builds dams to draw water, constructs water-lifting devices, and experiments with different crops to solve the problem of food first; then he raises a militia, sets military rules, and protects the village in the gap between bandits and officials; and later he depicts the desperate defense of the county seat under siege and his maneuvering to divide and deal with the "Chuang General" Li Zicheng and other forces, either confronting them or living as neighbors. The author deliberately stresses that a time traveler is not omnipotent: he passes the provincial examination yet is still secretly drafted into the army, the heads he fights for are shared by whoever sees them, and the militiamen he trains can be seized at any moment by local powers. The book is built on the grain, clans, military system, and civil examinations of Ming grassroots society, depicting small people's struggles and self-rescue under the triple pressures of natural disaster, bandits, and officialdom. The work began serialization in 2009, updated to chapter twenty-one on January 22, 2010, and ran to 134 chapters and about 365,200 characters before long going dormant; it is unfinished.