With six kings causing chaos inside and the Huns invading from outside, An Mengru invented something called gunpowder, which was extremely powerful and helped the Huns invade Daxia.
I think she was probably crazy. If the Huns succeeded in entering the pass, the first people they would suppress would be the Han people. What good would that end up for her?
The court officials suggested that I attack Daxia at this time to get a share of the spoils, but I didn't do that in the end. Instead, I took the initiative to lend Daxia hundreds of thousands of troops.
My decision was not wrong.
Daxia actually had gunpowder, muskets, and cannons... Compared to them, the Western Qiang Kingdom under my rule was like a primitive society.
Fortunately, Daxia did not attack us. The Huns in the north were beaten without any chance to fight back. After the war subsided, Daxia forcefully took back its fiefdom and developed at an extremely fast speed.
First, with the emergence of high-yield crops like millet and sweet potatoes, more and more people in Daxia could eat enough. Perhaps it was because of the past relationship between the emperor and his subjects, or perhaps it was because of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, or perhaps it was her, that we successfully brought back seeds and planting techniques from Daxia.
Secondly, Daxia planted a large amount of cotton. They improved the textile machines, the production cost of cloth decreased, the price also dropped, and more and more people could have clothes to wear.
The emergence of concrete extended the lifespan of houses, and the first batch of high-rise buildings were built in Shengjing... Local industries began to emerge, including fruit and tea planting, animal husbandry, and the construction of factories, such as sugar factories, paper factories, mushroom factories, and ceramic factories...
Daxia accumulated its first batch of funds through exporting goods and began its territorial expansion...
The countries in the Western Regions were destroyed, the Xiongnu were defeated repeatedly and forced to wander in the west.
Xia Zhiye never touched me. He might have been frightened by the way Yun Yuan protected me, so he was always cautious.
I would secretly go back to see her every year. She gave birth to five children for Xia Zhiye. I even secretly held one of them in my arms. He was sweet and soft, just like his mother.
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Another year of sweet osmanthus blooming, I made my last will and lay drowsy on the bed.
I heard crying sounds next to my ears, just like a pig being slaughtered, so ugly.
"Your Majesty, you can't die. If you die, what will happen if Daxia comes to attack us?"
"Your Majesty, please hold on for a few more years and at least give birth to a child. Being an emperor is so stressful, I don't want to be one!"
"Shut up!" I couldn't stand it any longer. I don't know where I got the strength from, maybe it was a last burst of energy, but I sat up in shock in my dying state and drove them all out.
I lay in bed, thinking about my life.
In the dream, she finally softened her heart and came to see me.
She was still the same as before, and I in the dream was still young. She held my hand and talked and laughed, and we watched the fireworks explode in the sky together.
Goodbye, my dear, and this world.
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An Mengru Extra
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In the 21st century, I am just an ordinary liberal arts student with ordinary looks and an ordinary family background.
Once I traveled through time, I found myself in a hunting ground. When I was surrounded by wolves, I thought I was going to die, but Xia Yanjin appeared and saved me.
I became a concubine of the Duke of Anguo. I had no worries about food and clothing, and my facial features were delicate. Except for a scar on my face, I was very satisfied with everything.
But my satisfaction did not last long. My stepmother did not like me and framed me for stealing my step-sister's jewelry, hoping that my biological father would dislike me. I took advantage of her trick and hid the jewelry. They could only blame themselves for not being able to find it, and I sold the jewelry and went to the pharmacy to buy scar removal ointment.
The shopkeeper told me that the ointment I liked was on consignment from someone else, and that’s how I got to know Su Ye.
Su Ye is as quiet as a chrysanthemum. Apart from medicine, he seems to be uninterested in anything else.
But I was interested in him. He was handsome and had good medical skills, so I tried to get his attention.
I mixed Lingquan water into the scar removal cream and pretended that it was a scar removal cream I had remixed and was several times more effective than the original one. Su Ye was fooled and asked me how I did it.
Of course I wouldn't tell him, so Su Ye would meet me every day. I told him that if he could answer ten of my questions at once, I would tell him the secret. I told him brain teasers, and he always laughed at me. As time went by, he slowly began to like me.
Finally, one day he answered ten questions correctly, and I gave him a bottle of spiritual spring water, saying it was spiritual liquid. After using it, Su Ye was amazed. In return, he would help me do something.
My eldest elder sister went to the Meilin Poetry Festival to show off her knowledge. She used to be the most talented woman in the capital. I wanted to pull her down, so I used a passage from "Snow Plum" by Lu Meipo of the Song Dynasty.
The plum blossoms and snow are vying for supremacy, refusing to yield, and poets have put down their pens and poems to comment on them. The plum blossoms are three points less white than the snow, but the snow is one point less fragrant than the plum blossoms.
My elder sister said that I stole the poem, so I recited Li Shangyin's "Remembering Plum Blossoms" on the spot.
I stay at the edge of the world, longing for the beauty of nature. The winter plum blossom is the most hateful, always looking like last year's flower.
My elder sister was speechless. I defeated her and became the most talented woman in the capital. I also gained a group of fans who supported me. I enjoyed their admiring gazes, which was something I had never experienced in my previous life.
In order to maintain my status as the most talented woman, I would write a poem from memory every month and post it at the entrance of the Anguo Mansion. I felt very proud when I heard the praises from outside.
I met Xia Yanjin again. He came to see me because of my poems, and soon we became close friends who could talk about anything.
He stood up for me and protected me when the noble lady bullied me.
Helped me in the family fight, my stepmother was divorced, my step-sister married far away, and my mother was made the legal wife.
No one in Shengjing bothers me anymore, and I feel happy every day.
And there is Chu Mu, the man whom I have never been able to understand. He is always distant towards me, with a look of three parts sarcasm and seven parts indifference on his face. He is the chief scholar of Xia country, but he is also a martial arts master. I once saw him kill a tiger with my own eyes.
Even Gu Xiao was amazed by my frontier poems. After seeing me, he asked me if I would like to marry him and ride horses together in the northern desert.
Su Ye noticed that my gaze was becoming more and more passionate, especially after I wrote a few pastoral poems. He thought I was longing for a pastoral life and asked me if I would like to retire to the mountains with him.
I was very panicked. What they liked were the beautiful impressions reflected by poems, but my poems were all stolen, and there were only so many poems in my mind, and sooner or later they would run out.
They don't really like me, but they like my image as a talented woman.
In order to maintain my image as a talented woman, I learned to dance, play the piano, and also learned calligraphy and painting. However, apart from the first two which I learned well, the latter two were too difficult for me.
My brother told me not to be discouraged, saying that I was already very good. But I knew that apart from the pseudo-skill of writing poetry, I was not good at anything else.
Oh, and I still have the looks.
My appearance is unique in the capital, but the appeal of beauty will decline year by year. Only my own character and talent... I began to feel anxious.
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