Chapter 90
Putting the studio setup aside for the time being, Xu Ying turned her attention back to writing "Starting with a Bowl".
"Starting with a Bowl" has been updated for a while now, and the male protagonist has been biding his time to expand his territory. It's time for him to truly become emperor and enjoy the ride.
......
In 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang led his army to attack the city. His old rival, Zhang Shicheng, was defeated, captured, and hanged himself. That same year, Zhu Yuanzhang sent troops on a northern expedition and issued a proclamation:
To expel the Tartars, restore China, establish order and discipline, and save the people[1].
Such a powerful and inspiring policy rallied countless people in the north to rise up against the Yuan dynasty.
By this time, the Yuan Dynasty was already isolated and helpless. Zhu Yuanzhang swept through the country, capturing several cities in succession. On the fourth day of the first month of the following year, he officially proclaimed himself emperor in Yingtian, changed the country's name to Ming, and adopted the reign title Hongwu.
Thus began the Ming Dynasty.
......
The founding of the nation was just the beginning; the next step was to reward meritorious officials and govern the country.
During Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, a series of measures, including promoting the planting of cash crops such as cotton, hemp, and mulberry, organizing the construction of water conservancy projects in various regions, encouraging farmers to reclaim wasteland, and surveying the land across the country, gradually restored social production.
While governing the country, Zhu Yuanzhang did not forget to quell external threats and recover the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun.
The Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun had been lost since the Northern Song Dynasty more than four hundred years ago. Their recovery was of extraordinary significance to the people of the Central Plains, and many people were so excited that they wept.
......
Xu Ying wrote very slowly.
It's not easy to write about emperors, especially those with historical prototypes.
Sometimes she wanted to improvise, but she was afraid of disrespecting the characters, so during the writing process she spent more time considering how to balance reality and creation than enjoying the process.
Fortunately, Zhu Yuanzhang is a legendary figure in himself, so she doesn't need to embellish his story to shock readers.
*
After the finale of "Legend of the Qing Dynasty", Song Yilian has now returned to her daily routine of only following the novel.
"Starting with a Bowl" is Er Yuetian's first novel with a male protagonist, but it is not her first novel about an emperor. As early as "Wu Zetian", she had already written a stunning and beautiful empress.
Not to mention Song Yilian, no one in the entire Taxue Forum guessed the profession of the protagonist in her next book.
Although many people online are criticizing Eryuetian, they themselves know that Eryuetian is someone who pursues innovation and doesn't like to put old wine in new bottles. So, in the guessing game, the emperor was eliminated first. The probability of the protagonist becoming a general is much higher than that.
Who would have thought that February would give them a surprise attack, and she even wrote about an emperor.
- He's probably run out of ideas.
-I knew it was impossible to innovate forever; in the end, it's all about making money and returning to your comfort zone.
This was the mockery that haters made of February Sky when I first started writing this article.
However, as we've all seen, Zhu Yuanzhang and Wu Zetian, though both emperors, have absolutely no connection in their paths to power. They followed completely different routes and cannot be compared at all.
Song Yilian even felt that the haters were completely wrong.
They say that February Sky has returned to her comfort zone to make money, but in her opinion, February Sky is not returning to her comfort zone at all; she is clearly challenging her own comfort zone.
For an author to create a completely new path to becoming an emperor after writing such a well-received story as Wu Zetian, the difficulty level increases exponentially.
After all, that's how people are; they're easily influenced by their existing experiences.
Let alone February, even among the small-time authors on Feihong Novel Network who follow the trend, many have started writing about empresses because of the popularity of "Wu Zetian".
However, the empresses portrayed by these people, even if they tried their best to avoid and innovate, still carried some of the shadow of Wu Zetian.
When these outsiders portray the role of an emperor, they unconsciously imitate "Wu Zetian," not to mention Er Yuetian, who wrote "Wu Zetian." She will only have a deeper memory of her own book and be more easily influenced by it.
However, unexpectedly, she completely broke free from this path of unconsciously replicating experiences controlled by the brain.
She found a completely new path, and it was this path that led her to create a new emperor, one who was completely stripped of Wu Zetian's legacy.
In Song Yilian's mind, Er Yuetian's strength had reached its peak.
Opening today's update, Song Yilian sat at her workstation and read it silently... Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, the Ming Dynasty, the name sounds very domineering.
February Sky is truly amazing. Putting aside her creative work, just in terms of naming, she is far superior to many authors.
The name "Ming Dynasty" is getting more and more natural to me.
As she looked around, Song Yilian suddenly noticed the appearance of a title: Northern Song Dynasty.
Northern Song Dynasty?
This dynasty seems to be appearing for the first time in Er Yuetian's novel. Is it also a dynasty in her creative blueprint?
Song Yilian couldn't help but take out a piece of paper and make a note of it.
The earliest mentions are in February Sky's first novel, "Back to High School," which mentions the Qin Dynasty and Qin Shi Huang. Then there's the Tang Dynasty in "The Little Painter of the Tang Dynasty," the Qing Dynasty in "Legend of the Qing Palace," and the Republic of China in "Code Name: Dodder Flower."
In "Starting with a Bowl", the male protagonist overthrew the Yuan Dynasty and established the Ming Dynasty. Now it is mentioned that he learned from the lessons of the Northern Song Dynasty and was determined to completely annihilate the remnants of the Yuan Dynasty who fled to Liaodong.
Therefore, the Northern Song Dynasty must have existed before the Yuan Dynasty.
As for why the word "North" was added to the Northern Song Dynasty, it's not hard to understand. Song Yilian deduced from the naming of those dynasties recorded in history books that the Song Dynasty must have undergone some kind of change, which is why it was called the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties.
That's right, she firmly believed that there was still a Southern Song Dynasty.
It's unclear whether the Southern Song or the Northern Song came first.
However, whether it's the Southern Song or the Northern Song is not the point; they can all be collectively referred to as the Song Dynasty.
All she knows is that the historical sequence she can currently confirm is the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, with the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China also following one another.
What about the Qin and Tang dynasties? Song Yilian held the pen, completely clueless.
Suddenly, she remembered the phrase "overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming," a phrase that seemed familiar.
It's "Legend of the Qing Dynasty"!!!
When Emperor Kangxi sent people to suppress local rebellions, someone casually mentioned that it was the slogan of some religion.
Having found a clue, Song Yilian immediately opened "Legend of the Qing Dynasty". She only had a vague idea in her mind, and she had long forgotten the specific details related to the slogan.
She wasn't sure if she was too curious about the connections between these dynasties, so she just made up this random thought.
Regardless, now that she had a guess, she was going to check it out in "Legend of the Qing Dynasty".
The White Lotus sect was severely suppressed during the Kangxi and Qianlong periods and did not amount to much. Therefore, Xu Ying only mentioned it casually as foreshadowing when she wrote it.
She didn't expect that someone would actually notice and go to the trouble of reading the book all over again just for that sentence.
"We've finally found it!"
Song Yilian couldn't remember where that sentence came from or what scene it was from. She only vaguely remembered that it seemed to be related to Kangxi, so she hurriedly read the novel again from the beginning, skipping all the palace intrigue parts and only looking for the scenes where Kangxi appeared.
Persistence pays off, and she actually found it.
It turns out that this rebellious sect was called the White Lotus Sect, and their slogans were "Overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming" and "Maitreya Buddha descends to earth".
She wasn't mistaken.
Song Yilian smiled. With this statement, it could be proven that the Qing Dynasty was the dynasty that followed the Ming Dynasty. Otherwise, the White Lotus Sect's slogan would not have been "Overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming."
In other words, the order that can be confirmed now is Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, and the Republic of China. Only the Qin and Tang dynasties are still unknown... Wait, Song Yilian remembered something else.
The Tang Dynasty also seems to be a newly established country, so the text will inevitably mention the previous dynasty.
Having read the book "The Little Painter of the Tang Dynasty," once the idea took hold, recalling it became like small dots forming lines and planes, and she remembered more and more things.
The male protagonist, King Wu, seems to be the son of a princess from the previous dynasty. It is because of the bloodline of the previous dynasty that he is not destined for the throne.
So which dynasty does this "previous dynasty" refer to?
Could it be the Qin Dynasty? Song Yilian stared at the only remaining Qin Dynasty on the paper, her heart pounding. Had she just solved the mystery of the dynasty in the book "February Sky"?
Song Yilian then found "The Little Painter of the Tang Dynasty".
This novel was written by Er Yuetian two years ago. So much time has passed that her memory of it is even worse than that of "Legend of the Qing Dynasty".
After searching for another half hour, she finally found it. The previous dynasty mentioned in the book was the Sui Dynasty... well, not the Qin Dynasty. Song Yilian was inexplicably a little disappointed.
However, if it were the Sui Dynasty, wouldn't that mean a completely new dynasty had emerged?
Good heavens, Song Yilian felt more and more confused. What kind of nation was Er Yuetian planning to create? This nation had so many dynasties, how did she even come up with that idea?!
Song Yilian once again ranked the existing dynasties, with the Qin Dynasty standing out, the Sui and Tang Dynasties following one after the other, followed by the Song, Yuan, Ming and the Republic of China.
The Yuan, Ming, and Republican eras are definitely consecutive, but it's unclear how many dynasties were interspersed between the Song and Yuan dynasties.
Song Yilian felt that her brain capacity had reached its limit.
She had read too many novels today, and her brain was almost completely overloaded, so she organized her analysis and evidence and posted it online.
One person's strength is limited, but the strength of netizens is boundless.
She felt she could ask netizens for help in filling in the gaps. Er Yuetian had written so many books and produced two TV series; perhaps there were details she hadn't discovered yet hidden somewhere.
Song Yilian compiled a short essay and posted it on her Big Eyes account. After reading her analysis, many netizens suddenly realized the truth.
In fact, the connections between some dynasties are quite obvious.
Take the Yuan and Ming dynasties as examples. Anyone who has read "Starting with a Bowl" knows about them, but people didn't pay much attention to them before, so even if they saw them, they wouldn't think about them further.
Things are different now.
Now, someone has taken the lead in listing the dynastic order in the February astronomical events, and has even presented evidence with reason and evidence, which has immediately piqued everyone's interest.
Searching for the truth from various clues is what netizens love to do most, especially when they cross-reference information from several different books, which makes it even more interesting.
For a time, readers of February Sky became fascinated by various analyses of dynasties.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
