The Empire's "Final Purification Protocol" was completed on an ordinary morning.

For the hundreds of millions of new citizens in the "Fourth Development Zone," this event didn't even trigger a single news notification on their personal devices. The Ming imperial family, that colossal entity that had oppressed them for nearly three hundred years, along with that distant and vague emperor named Chongzhen, vanished like a gentle breeze across the water, leaving only a tiny ripple before disappearing without a trace.

Nobody cares whether they live or die.

When a person struggles daily for survival, when his world consists only of a tiny plot of land and endless taxes, whether the emperor's surname is Zhu or Li is meaningless. But when he is rescued from hell by a true "god" and brought to a paradise he could never have dreamed of, his meager, habitual awe of his former master vanishes instantly, replaced by a new, fervent, and heartfelt faith.

A year after the Holy Star Empire descended upon this land, the people had undergone a complete transformation, both materially and spiritually. They were no longer "citizens of the Ming Dynasty," but "citizens of the Empire," the most loyal followers of "Emperor Lin Feng." The suffering of the old era had become a distant, unbearable nightmare, while the happiness of the new era was so real, so tangible, that every single moment felt like an unreal dream.

Wang Erniu, a man in his early thirties from Shaanxi, was a typical starving peasant who could turn into a bandit at any moment a year ago.

His memory was etched with an indelible mark of hunger.

He remembered the days before the empire's rise. Back then, the sky was always a grayish-yellow, as if shrouded in endless dust. The wheat in the fields was sparse, shorter than weeds, with pitifully small ears. He and his wife, Cuihua, worked from sunrise to sunset every day, turning over every inch of the cracked earth, but after paying the imperial taxes and the subsequent layers of embezzlement by the village head and county officials, the harvested grain wouldn't even last six months.

He remembered his first child, a frail baby girl, who slowly grew cold in his arms on a cold winter night. She didn't cry, but just looked at him with her big, clear eyes, as if asking, "Father, why am I so hungry?" Wang Erniu held her tiny body, facing the heavens, unable to utter a sound, only tears falling like broken beads. He hated, hated this damned heaven, hated this damned world.

By then, some villagers had already started eating clay. He witnessed his neighbor Zhang San, his stomach swollen like a drum, collapse on the edge of a field and never get up again. Despair, like a plague, spread in everyone's heart. When Li Zicheng's army passed by, Wang Erniu's eyes turned red. He gripped the only rusty wood-chopping knife in his house, ready to follow "King Chuang" to "eat his mother's food and wear his mother's clothes," to steal a bite of food to survive.

On the night he was about to take that step, a miracle occurred.

He would never forget that scene. The black "sky ship," blotting out the sky, hovered silently in the air, even more magnificent than the legendary heavenly palace. Countless steel giants descended from the sky, their footsteps making the earth tremble. Then, a voice as grand as a divine oracle proclaimed "the crimes of the Ming Dynasty" and "the grace of the Empire."

Most importantly, food.

Compressed bread, fragrant with wheat, fell from the sky like snowflakes, and nutritional paste that tasted so good he wanted to cry.

Like all the villagers, Wang Erniu rushed forward like a madman, devouring the food. It was the first time in thirty years he had known what it meant to be "full." When the warm food filled his long-empty stomach, he knelt on the ground, facing the "heavenly boat" in the sky, weeping and kowtowing repeatedly. At that moment, the rebel leader, the Ming Dynasty—all were forgotten. The "Heavenly Emperor" named "Lin Feng," who had bestowed this food upon him, became his only, supreme god.

A year later, Wang Er'er Niu's life has undergone earth-shattering changes.

He lived in a standard apartment in "Citizen Community 101". The apartment was practically a paradise. The walls were a smooth, jade-like white material, warm in winter and cool in summer. The floor was as smooth as a mirror and never got dirty, as if some invisible force was constantly keeping it clean. There were no more fleas or mosquitoes, no more leaks or cold winds.

He and his wife, Cuihua, have a separate bedroom and a children's room specifically for their two-year-old son, "Wang Qimeng." What they find most incredible is the room known as the "integrated bathroom." With the touch of a button, perfectly heated water sprays down, washing away the day's fatigue. The white thing called the "toilet" is even more amazing; waste is instantly decomposed, leaving no odor.

The kitchen has been completely replaced by a device called the "Nutrition Delivery Port." Three meals a day are delivered automatically with a simple tap on a screen on the wall, steaming hot, nutritionally balanced meals appearing automatically at the delivery port. There's fluffy synthetic rice, incredibly realistic braised pork belly, and various vitamin-rich vegetable purees. While the taste can't compare to real delicacies, it's a far cry from the meager fare of the past.

Cuihua's transformation was perhaps even greater than Wang Erniu's. Her feet, bound for over a decade, were healed by medical nanobots on her very first day in the community. When she first removed the bindings and ran across the community lawn like a normal person, she cried for an entire afternoon. Afterward, she cut her long hair, donned the uniform of an Imperial citizen, and began learning something she had never dared to dream of before—painting—through her personal terminal. The Empire's basic knowledge base contained countless art tutorials, which she absorbed, painting mountains, water, anti-gravity transport ships traversing the sky, and the new, beautiful world she saw.

Wang Erniu himself was no longer a farmer.

The land no longer needs manual cultivation. On what was once the Guanzhong Plain, now stand enormous, fully enclosed "ecological agricultural domes." After a week of neural-sensor training, Wang Erniu mastered basic mechanical repair and data monitoring knowledge, becoming a level-two maintenance technician for the "No. 3 Agricultural Dome."

His job is to take the community's anti-gravity bus every day to the magnificent dome, put on clean work clothes, and check the operation of the fully automated planting, watering, and harvesting robots. Inside the dome, it's always spring. Rows of genetically modified super rice, nourished by nutrient solution pipes, grow at a visible speed, maturing in three months, with yields hundreds or thousands of times greater than before.

He no longer had to rely on the weather for his livelihood. There were no droughts, no locust plagues, only precise, uninterrupted harvests controlled by the AI ​​"Pangu." Looking at the boundless, golden waves of rice, he felt an unprecedented sense of peace and pride. He knew that this grain, through that vast logistics network, would feed everyone on this land, making hunger, the nightmare that had plagued the Chinese nation for thousands of years, a thing of the past.

Every day after work, his favorite thing to do was hold his son, Wang Qimeng. Little Qimeng was chubby, healthy, and lively. He had been vaccinated with the Empire's vaccine since birth, and the medical nanobots inside his body would protect him from all diseases. He no longer had to worry that his child would die from a slight cold or measles.

In the evenings, the family of three would sit in the living room, watching the empire's news projected on a holographic screen. The news always highlighted the empire's power and the emperor's wisdom. They would see swarms of "Calamity" drones clearing out aliens in distant star systems, witness the spectacular sight of magnificent interstellar warships warping, and see Emperor Lin Feng in the Nine Heavens Moon-Embracing Palace, outlining the blueprint for the entire empire's future.

Whenever Lin Feng's handsome and dignified face appeared on the screen, Wang Erniu would immediately stand up, hold his son, and together with his wife, perform a solemn imperial citizen salute in front of the screen.

"Thank you, Heavenly Emperor, for giving me a new life," he would say from the bottom of his heart.

His son, Wang Qimeng, though only two years old, imitated the adults, babbling and calling out, "Heavenly... Emperor..."

In Wang Erniu's eyes, this was happiness. The most real, the most perfect happiness. As for the erased Ming Dynasty, and those "purified" princes, to him they were like ants crushed under his feet, insignificant, even deserving of death. It was they, that corrupt dynasty, who made him and millions of his compatriots live worse than pigs and dogs. The Heavenly Emperor was the true savior. To maintain this happiness, to repay the Heavenly Emperor's grace, he was willing to give up everything, including his life and soul.

In Suzhou, in the Jiangnan region, Zhang Tielin was once the city's best blacksmith.

His craft was passed down through generations. The kitchen knives he forged could cut a hair in an instant; the plowshares he made were sturdy and durable. However, in the old days, having a good craft did not guarantee a good life.

He had to contend with the exploitation by the government. The constables from the yamen would come every few days to offer bribes, and if he didn't comply, they'd accuse him of "illegal business operations" and shut down his shop. He had to endure the cutthroat competition from his peers; those well-connected merchants flooded the market with inferior ironware at low prices, making it difficult for small workshops like his to survive. He also had to worry about war; every time the army passed through, his shop might be requisitioned, and he himself might be conscripted as a military craftsman, his fate uncertain.

He was like a blindfolded donkey, pulling a heavy millstone day after day, seeing no hope. His dream was to create a masterpiece of ironwork, a work of art to be passed down through generations, not these pots and pans meant to make a living. But reality shattered his dream.

For Zhang Tielin, the arrival of the empire was a complete liberation.

First, it liberated productive forces.

The empire brought fully automated industrial machine tools. Those knives and farm implements that once required him to painstakingly forge could now be printed out in seconds on the production line, with quality far exceeding his best craftsmanship. He lost his job, but he felt no panic; instead, an unprecedented sense of relief.

He no longer needs to work as a blacksmith to make a living.

After conducting a detailed skills assessment, the staff at the Imperial Citizen Service Center gave him a new option: to study at the newly established "Fourth Frontier Area - School of Materials Application and Art Design".

With a mix of trepidation and excitement, Zhang Tielin stepped into the academy, made of fast-growing crystal and gleaming in the sunlight. Here, he witnessed a completely new world.

He studied "metallurgy," learning how different elements such as iron, carbon, chromium, and tungsten combine at the microscopic level to produce different hardness, toughness, and melting points. His ancestral, experience-based quenching techniques seemed so rudimentary in the face of rigorous scientific theory.

He came across "high-energy laser melting and forging technology," which eliminated the need to work up a sweat pulling the bellows. He only needed to set the parameters on the control panel, and a precise energy beam could cut the hardest alloy into any shape he wanted.

He even came across "primary material recombination printing," which can break down scrap metal at the atomic level and then recombine it into entirely new, flawless materials.

For the first time, his calloused hands touched the touchpad of virtual design. He could freely construct the model in his mind in three-dimensional space, adjust every detail, and conduct countless simulations until it was perfect.

The old constraints were broken, and Zhang Tielin's artistic talent erupted like a volcano.

He perfectly blended traditional cloud patterns, dragons and phoenixes, and landscape imagery with the empire's futuristic, streamlined geometric aesthetics.

He designed and personally crafted a 30-meter-tall sculpture for the central plaza of "Citizen Community No. 101." It's a phoenix made of memory metal, each feather composed of thousands of tiny parts. Under the control of a smart system, this phoenix can slowly spread its wings, its feathers displaying shimmering colors that change with the light. In the morning, it raises its neck and sings a clear, melodious song, awakening the entire community; at night, it radiates a soft glow, becoming the most beautiful embellishment in the night sky.

This sculpture, titled "Nirvana," brought him instant fame.

Today, Zhang Tielin is one of the most renowned "Imperial Artists" in the entire Jiangnan region. He is no longer the "blacksmith" who haggled over a few coins; he has become a "master" of creating beauty. Dressed in a neat uniform, he leads a group of equally passionate young people in his spacious and bright studio, using techniques unimaginable in the old days to realize one imaginative idea after another.

His daughter, the kind of girl who might have been forced to marry a merchant as a concubine in the old days, is now studying "anti-gravity engine engineering" at the academy. Her dream is to design the next generation of civilian transport ships capable of short-distance interstellar travel.

Zhang Tielin often stands by the window of his studio, gazing at the beautiful phoenix sculpture outside, and reminiscing about the smoky, oppressive blacksmith shop of the past. He sincerely sighs, believing that it was the Heavenly Emperor Lin Feng who transformed him from a "labor slave" into a true "human being," someone capable of pursuing dreams and realizing self-worth.

His loyalty to the empire stemmed not from fear or brainwashing, but from the deepest gratitude for the "favor shown to him." He was willing to dedicate his life's talents to praising this great era and adorning this perfect world created by the Heavenly Emperor himself.