Chapter 2: Chief Wen's Ambition

Wen Desi recounted his solo journey through the wormhole. On the other side, his bathroom opened onto the foot of a hill, beside a small river. The landscape was a patchwork of well-tended fields, suggesting a prosperous agricultural region in Southern China. He was still debating whether to explore a nearby village when the unthinkable happened.

A troop of soldiers in ancient armor, led by a mounted officer, herded a dozen or so villagers to the riverbank and began a swift, brutal massacre.

Wen Desi had seen his share of gruesome images online, but witnessing such carnage firsthand, from less than thirty meters away, was a visceral shock that left him trembling.

When it was over, the soldiers methodically decapitated the corpses, scattered a few broken weapons among the bodies, and then rode off, closing ranks around their officer.

“…Thank God I was wearing camouflage,” Wen Desi said, the fear still clinging to his voice. “The closest ones were less than ten meters from me.”

His first impression of this new spacetime was the clean, fresh air. His second was that his life was in constant, immediate danger.

He opened his laptop and showed them the photos. The bloody, headless corpses, captured in the stark detail of his 9-megapixel DSLR, were so real they were nauseating.

“I also found some of these scattered around.” He produced a plastic bag containing a handful of copper coins. “Several different kinds. I had someone look at them. The newest one is a Tianqi Tongbao.”

“It could be from the Chongzhen era, then.”

“It has to be after the second year of Tianqi,” Xiao Zishan said confidently. “The Guangzong Emperor was only on the throne for a few months. In the first year of Tianqi, they were still minting his father’s Taichang Tongbao. The Tianqi coins weren’t minted until the second year. Factor in the time for minting and circulation, and I’d say it’s after the third year of Tianqi, at the earliest.”

“That’s still a pretty wide window. Those two brothers were on the throne for over twenty years.”

“I’d bet on the Tianqi era, or early Chongzhen at the latest. Chongzhen Tongbao coins were minted in huge quantities all over the country. It’s statistically improbable to find only Tianqi coins.”

With the era roughly established, the question became: what now?

A wormhole to another spacetime was a monumental discovery for science, but the three men in the bathroom were no physicists. A Nobel Prize was out of the question. If this became major news, they would be the story, not the reporters. Chief Wen, as the discoverer, might get a brief mention, but that would be the extent of it. And, being a rather paranoid trio, they all suspected that the existence of the wormhole would be swiftly covered up, just like Area 51. In that scenario, their futures looked bleak.

The two men who weren’t the discoverer understood that this was an opportunity. If Wen Desi had truly been interested in a physics prize or his “solo, two-way, low-profile transmigration” fantasy, he never would have made that post.

How big of an opportunity? As Chief Wen had said, it was a chance to own a world—the 17th century on another plane of existence.

The thought made their breath catch in their throats.

After a brief, intense discussion in Wen Desi’s bathroom, the first Executive Committee was formed, and its first official document was drafted. In the annals of their new world’s history, this would be known as the “Bathroom Meeting.”

The resolution passed by the committee was simple: Establish a new world!

But how? The people of the past were not mindless NPCs. They were just as intelligent as modern humans, and they possessed a courage and resilience that the coddled people of the 21st century lacked. These three men, for all their love of time-travel novels, knew they didn’t have any protagonist plot armor.

Their only advantage was the accumulated knowledge of 300 years of civilization.

“Scale and standardization,” Wang Luobin said, “are our keys to victory. An industrialized society can crush any ancient one.”

The plan was audacious: gather a legion of modern-day experts in technology and management, transport modern industrial equipment to the past, and establish a beachhead. From there, they would build a self-sufficient industrial base and, eventually, conquer the world.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. They set two immediate goals:

Recruit more transmigrators and raise funds for equipment and supplies.

Wen Desi created a Skype chat group for communication. The original forum post had already gone viral. He added the group number and a backup email, then locked the thread. They agreed to keep a low profile from now on.

As for money, their combined savings amounted to less than a million yuan—a laughably small sum for jump-starting an industrial revolution.

Of course, new recruits would bring their own funds, but it wouldn’t be enough. The most realistic way to generate capital was to exploit the economic disparities between the two spacetimes.

The classic time-travel trope of selling modern trinkets for a fortune in the past was their best bet. Glass mirrors, lighters, watches—the staples of countless fictional time-travelers who had built empires from a single pot of gold.

Xiao Zishan, a man whose penchant for petty hoarding finally paid off, contributed his collection of corporate promotional gifts:

Plastic powder boxes with mirrors, melamine bowls and utensils, small fruit knives, plastic aprons, acrylic hat-scarf-glove sets, glass mugs, plastic lunch boxes, towels… three or four boxes full of cheap, ugly, logo-stamped junk from Yiwu. But in that moment, to these three men, it was all glittering gold.

In the 17th century, Venetian glass was a luxury in Europe and nonexistent in Asia. Their mirrors were a monopoly. Unbreakable bowls, transparent lunch boxes… even the empty plastic water bottles they’d just finished—these were all novelties that could, in theory, fetch any price. A hundred taels of silver for a powder box, two thousand for a cup, a hundred for a bowl… the possibilities were intoxicating.

The three men were flushed with the promise of a golden future. Wen Desi even felt a pang of regret—maybe he could have conquered the world on his own, after all.

“But if we just waltz in there, we’ll be arrested as Japanese pirates before we even reach the city gates,” Wang Luobin said, bringing them back to reality.

“Is there a coastal defense yamen in Guangzhou?”

“I don’t know, but the Office of Maritime Trade should be there.”

“He’s right. Our clothes, our accents… we’ll stick out like sore thumbs. And we don’t have any travel permits.”

“We won’t be exiled to Liaodong, will we?”

“Unlikely, but if we’re dragged to the yamen for questioning, we’ll be skinned alive, even if we’re innocent.” Xiao Zishan recalled the memoir of a Portuguese pirate captured in the Ming Dynasty. The man had praised the fairness of the Ming justice system, but also described its brutality in gruesome detail. The thought of the tortures he’d read about sent a shiver down his spine.

“We could find some Hanfu websites. I’ve seen a few that are very accurate with their Ming Dynasty clothing.”

“The clothes might pass, but our mannerisms won’t,” Wang Luobin countered. “We’d look even more suspicious.”

“What if we pose as foreign merchants?” Wen Desi suggested. “Sea merchants from Borneo. Or maybe tribute envoys? Don’t emperors love it when foreign dignitaries come to court?”

“The tribute trade is long dead,” Xiao Zishan said. “And the court has bigger problems to deal with right now. Besides, the Ming Dynasty had strict regulations for foreigners. Only the Portuguese were allowed to trade in Macau, and their ships couldn’t even enter the Pearl River.”

“The Portuguese can enter Guangzhou?”

“Yes, apparently Guangzhou held a trade fair twice a year, where merchants from all over would come to trade with the Portuguese.”

“So the Canton Fair has been around that long,” Wang Luobin marveled.

The Canton Fair, once China’s primary gateway for foreign trade, had its roots in the Ming Dynasty, though it was only open to the Portuguese back then. It was held every summer and winter on Haizhu Island, now the site of the Haizhu District General Labor Union.

“But none of us look very Portuguese. Were there ethnic Chinese with foreign nationality back then?”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“This is a headache. We need to do some historical research.”

Suddenly, Xiao Zishan slapped the table and laughed.

“We’re so stupid! Why are we trying to figure out how to get into Guangzhou? We’re already in Guangzhou!”

Their eyes lit up. Of course. Since the wormhole’s entry and exit points were the same in both spacetimes, they could simply cross over from within the boundaries of the Ming Dynasty’s Guangzhou city. And if they ran into trouble, they could just open the wormhole and escape.

They chose Haopan Street, a bustling commercial district on the south bank of the Pearl River. It had been a hub of commerce since the Southern Song Dynasty, and by the Ming, it was a notorious haven for smugglers. These merchants, in collusion with the fishermen on Youyu Island at the mouth of the Pearl River, trafficked in goods from “foreign ships.” “Every time a foreign ship arrived,” Xiao Zishan quoted from his memory, “they would collude with the wealthy merchants from other provinces on Haopan Street to move porcelain, silk, private money, and gunpowder, leaving fully loaded and returning fully loaded.” He suspected these “wealthy merchants” had official connections, which would explain why their smuggling operations were so brazen.

Since they were all smugglers, they wouldn’t care where their suppliers came from. Profit was their only god. The merchants of Haopan Street, it seemed, were the perfect business partners.