Chapter 3: We Have No Golden Finger? Director, Change the Script! We Got the Wrong One

When it comes to little things like transmigration or rebirth, there probably isn't a single man in all of China who wouldn't want it to happen to him — not counting the likes of Papa Ma or Principal Wang, and not counting those sissies either.

The former lack nothing, and as for the latter, you can't expect them to have that kind of fire in their blood.

Of course, whether transmigration or rebirth, it's a good thing either way — a great thing worth celebrating far and wide! And if you get to transmigrate or be reborn with a golden finger, then that's the famous Guangdong cigarette: Double Happiness.

There's a historical lesson in this. Look at that fellow surnamed Yang who went back to the Ming dynasty to be a prince — the guy soul-transmigrated, and the legendary "opening with just a dog" is exactly his type.

Of course, protagonist halo doesn't count, so the guy also started out with Han Youxiang — probably countless men wanted to kill the bastard and carry Youxiang home.

And there's that Zhang Haogu who went back to the Tianqi era to be a talent and rose three ranks in a row. What was he before his rebirth?

A public servant monkey! Tempered on the battlefield of alcohol, flattering and bootlicking — he was professionally trained.

After soul-transmigrating over, he kissed Eunuch Wei's ass, trained the New Army, and along the way put a great big green hat on the Tianqi Emperor. In the end, though the guy never became emperor, that little emperor was his son!

And then there's Fang Xing, the one who went back to the Ming — the man was practically a BUG made flesh. He went back carrying two docks with him! They say there was all sorts of stuff inside, even a Gatling gun that went rat-tat-tat and spat blue fire...

And also, also that guy surnamed Yun who went back to the Tang dynasty — he brought back quite a few good things too, and he was an all-purpose know-it-all, and he even had a bromance with the Crown Prince of the time, tight as could be, and set up an academy.

And look at him in the end — Marquis Who Upholds the State, enduring as long as the state itself.

To sum up the above: if you want to transmigrate or be reborn, at the very least you need to bring proper equipment, get yourself a golden finger or something. At minimum you need to have mastered enough poetry and verse — otherwise how are you going to show off?

If you don't show off, how are you going to pick up girls? If you don't pick up girls, how are you going to get a wife?

If you don't get a wife, what did you transmigrate back for?

Or, if you've got enough science and engineering knowledge, that works too — then you can build guns and cannons, and in the end contend for the empire, with three thousand beauties in the palace all the same, so the trip back wouldn't be wasted.

But here's the problem: our protagonist, the great, merciful, benevolent, the one and only sage sovereign in five thousand years — His Majesty the Chongzhen Emperor — has no golden finger!

Nor is he a public servant monkey by background, nor does he have all sorts of physics and chemistry skills — he returned all that stuff to his teachers long ago, and every time he chats with a teacher it's to discuss whether he can get his tuition refunded!

So after Wei Zhongxian and Tian Ergeng got the hell out, the wise and mighty Chongzhen Emperor began muttering to himself, making Wang Cheng'en, who was following behind, wonder whether His Imperial Majesty had run into something unclean today: "System? System?

Damn, nothing. Assistant?

Assistant? Motherfucking idiot, nothing either."

Then he switched to an extremely sickeningly sweet tone: "Old grandpa? Old grandpa?

Are you there? His mother, looks like he's not here either."

Now this was a headache. What did the Chongzhen Emperor do before transmigrating?

To put it nicely, he was a software development engineer. To put it bluntly, the guy was a miserable code monkey, a code farmer who writes code!

How does that saying go? Code monkeys, art dogs, can't leave until the moon's out.

His professional skills were hopeless, unless our emperor first came up with vacuum tubes, transistors, all sorts of integrated circuits, and also had to produce lithography machines and other equipment — only then would the divine skill he knew, writing code, possibly have any use.

Right now, this was obviously a bare-bones soul transmigration! No golden finger, no old grandpa.

And so this worried the Chongzhen Emperor half to death, and he often stood alone muttering at the sky: "Our golden finger, Our special powers — or at least give Us a warehouse like Fang Xing's, that would do.

If even that won't work, give Us a pile of Gatling guns that go rat-tat-tat and spit blue fire..."

Wang Cheng'en thought his imperial master had come down with hysteria. For the majestic sovereign of a nation to develop hysteria after ascending the throne — this was simply the greatest joke of the dynasty's three hundred years.

But for the Chongzhen Emperor, he truly did not want to hang from that crooked-necked tree on Coal Hill seventeen years later.

Since there was no golden finger, no special powers, and in the end not even a portable old grandpa, no warehouse, and no Gatling guns that went rat-tat-tat and spat blue fire — but no matter, at least he still remembered some things from later ages, right?

At least he'd read so many novels that even if he hadn't memorized the big and small events of history, he at least had some impression of them, right?

First of all, Wei Zhongxian absolutely could not be killed off. What was Wei Zhongxian for? He was what the departed Tianqi Emperor left behind for Chongzhen to rake in money. Without Wei Zhongxian, who would go get money for Chongzhen? And what happens when you have no money?

At the time, Chongzhen asked Wu Xiang, the Regional Commander of Shanhai Pass, how much pay and provisions it would take to transfer the Guanning Iron Cavalry to the capital to protect the throne, and the answer was one million taels.

Chongzhen, who had transmigrated from a later age, understood one saying perfectly: "Anything that can be settled with money is no problem at all!"

The problem was there was no money.

Don't bring up Chongzhen's privy purse — at the time, Chongzhen's privy purse had already been poured entirely into the state treasury, and the state treasury? So empty you could race mice in it!

He had just ascended the throne. Who was truly loyal? Who was truly treacherous? Apart from the old eunuch Wang Cheng'en, who would hang himself alongside him on Coal Hill, who else could he trust?

The Duke of Ying, Zhang Weixian, could be trusted — after all, from the first Duke of Ying to the last Duke of Ying, they had all died in battle for the old Zhu family.

And what about Zhu Chunchen, the Duke of Cheng? That old thing surrendered to the rebels! And it seems there was some sort of scandal or something? Something pretty disgusting too?

And then there was Luo Yangxing, the Guard Commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard at the time. That dog of a man enjoyed the state's grace for generations, yet mingled with the Donglin Faction crowd, and later surrendered to the Jianzhou barbarians as well. Could he be trusted?

So by comparison, Wei Zhongxian, Wang Cheng'en, and these eunuchs, along with a portion of the meritorious nobles, were somewhat more trustworthy.

As for the rumors on later internet forums, and in the current Great Ming, that Wei Zhongxian wanted to kill Chongzhen, that Wei Zhongxian colluded with Madam Ke to cause Empress Zhang, the Tianqi Emperor's empress, to miscarry many times, so that there was no Crown Prince, and in the end the throne could only pass to Chongzhen, and other such gossip?

Actually, if you use your brain a little, it's highly unlikely.

After all, no matter how stupid Wei Zhongxian and Madam Ke were, they would understand that controlling a wet-behind-the-ears child emperor would be much simpler than controlling the Prince of Xin, who had never been friendly to them — that is, the later Chongzhen Emperor who killed them, right?

For eunuchs, where did their power come from? Wasn't it all from the emperor's favor?

Liu Jin, officially appointed seal-holding eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial, was the head of the "Eight Tigers." People of his time called him the "Standing Emperor," and Emperor Wuzong the "Sitting Emperor."

Yet after his house was confiscated, there were millions of taels of gold and silver — simply a disgrace to eunuchs.

How did the majestic Standing Emperor Liu Jin die? A single slip of paper went out, and he was sliced more than three thousand times — a eunuch who planned rebellion but hadn't prepared troops, and instead surrendered without a fight?

Wei Zhongxian, the majestic Nine Thousand Years of the Great Ming, hanged himself while being exiled to Fengyang.

So the eunuchs of the Great Ming were badass, truly badass — but that badassery came from the emperor's trust, not from themselves.

In other words, once Chongzhen's ascension was a settled matter, Wei Zhongxian would certainly have thought first of how to curry favor with Chongzhen, not how to harm him — doing that would have been courting death in the biggest way!

As for the later records in the History of Ming, that was compiled under the auspices of the Manchu Qing, and revised by the disciples and grand-disciples of the Donglin Faction. Its credibility is probably about what you'd expect — at best, better than nothing.

If they didn't sling a bit more mud on the Great Ming, how would the purple qi rise from the east? How would the Great Qing enter the pass? How would the Age of Abundant Prosperity come about? How would they keep ceding territory and paying indemnities?

The key is, if they didn't prove that the Great Ming's fall was Heaven's will, how could they whitewash the Donglin literati's treasonous surrender as good ministers choosing a worthy lord to serve?

As for the present, the wise and mighty Chongzhen Emperor couldn't find his golden finger, and with no other choice, he could only take the novels he'd read on a certain site in his previous life as his magic weapon.

At least he knew that eunuchs were far more reliable than the Donglin Faction, so first of all he absolutely could not kill off Old Wei. As for the rest — the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the Eastern Depot, the Western Depot — he had no intention of letting any of them go.

Everything usable, he'd put to use!

If ministers didn't obey, kill them and replace them as much as he liked. The Great Ming didn't lack for much, but people sharpening their heads to become officials were everywhere.

With the intensity that Zhu the Eighth and Old Fourth Zhu killed officials, people still became officials all the same, so killing a few by the Chongzhen Emperor probably wouldn't be a problem either.

The urgent matter at hand was, first, to have that old thing Wang Cheng'en and the Eastern Sect Leader work together to get the Inner Depot up and running, lest he end up like several of the emperors before him, dying without knowing how or why!

Secondly, he still needed to find a few reliable dragon legs, and build a few armies that would be utterly loyal to him to the death — the kind that wouldn't blink even if ordered to die. After all, the great man said: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Only with guns are you a grassroots king.

The Chongzhen Emperor, in a very bad mood, continued muttering: "Director, I think I got the wrong script. Could you swap it for another one..."

(End of Chapter)