The year 1908 was nearly over. Another New Year's celebration waited just beyond the last thin pages of December—another night of champagne, uniforms, music, and polite lies.
But Oskar was not the same man he had once been.
No more was he just the Acting Crown Prince, or the empire's scandal and its miracle at the same time—secretly Europe's richest man (or close enough that it stopped mattering), publicly the prince who made the world nervous and Germany stronger.
Because now, he had something else.
This year, he had just become the General of the East.
The title still made him want to laugh.
He remembered how the generals had dispersed after the meeting—boots echoing down palace corridors, sabers softly clinking, faces stiff with discipline or thinly veiled resentment. The Kaiser's word had been spoken. The decision made. No one had truly protested.
No one ever did, not when Wilhelm II decided to be a mountain.
And now—
Now Oskar stood in his chambers in Potsdam, where the air was warm.
Not "old-palace warm," with fireplaces losing battles against endless stone and drafty halls.
Warm because he had forced it to be warm—because pipes carried heat through walls, because boilers did their quiet work, because electric lamps glowed steadily and made even winter feel less like a punishment.
Snow drifted pale beyond the tall windows. Light reflected off it and painted the room in cold silver.
Oskar stood before a tall mirror.
Broad shoulders squared. Posture perfect—not because anyone was watching, but because the body he inhabited expected it. He was just over two meters tall now, muscle dense and clean, earned through discipline rather than ornament. Light-blond hair cut sharp. Icy blue eyes staring back at him with a mix of disbelief and satisfaction.
Behind him, Tanya and Anna were getting ready for the New Year's party, moving around each other like practiced partners. The children were there too—eight of them—too loud, too alive, turning a royal suite into a small kingdom of chaos.
Oskar watched himself for a moment… and then, helplessly, he laughed under his breath.
"Holy shit," he muttered—first in Mandarin, then in German—and laughed again. "General of the East."
Best Christmas present ever.
The uniform helped.
This wasn't cosplay. This wasn't fantasy. This was Prussian authority made cloth and metal—perfectly tailored for a frame like his.
The dark blue tunic fit him like destiny had measured him personally. Gold embroidery traced collar and cuffs. His shoulder boards gleamed with the unmistakable markings of a general officer. The belt sat heavy at his waist. The sword at his hip was ceremonial—yes—
—but sharp.
Real weight. Real edge.
His white gloves creaked faintly when he flexed his fingers.
New boots.
New cap.
New collar tabs.
New orders pinned to his chest—fresh, deliberate, unmistakable.
Every piece whispered the same thing:
This man outranks you… even if he didn't spend his youth in school.
Oskar tilted his head, studying the medals and insignia, the subtle language of metal and thread that only officers truly understood.
"Damn," he murmured. "I look cool as hell."
Then he exhaled—and the modern mind beneath the Prussian shell reasserted itself like a hand dragging him back from a mirror's illusion.
Alright.
Reality check.
He wasn't truly the "General of the East." Not officially. That was the title his own mind had invented—because it sounded like a final boss and made the blood feel warm.
Still… it would spread.
It would become a whisper through officer messes and ministries. It would become a newspaper phrase, carefully implied rather than printed. It would become a rumor the Russians heard and either laughed at—or took far too seriously.
A twenty-year-old prince, rich enough to buy industries, now placed over the eastern frontier.
Some would sneer.
Some would grow overconfident.
And a few smart men would feel cold fear.
The truth was more precise.
And more dangerous.
In reality, he was now Inspector of the Eastern Army Inspectorate—the formation that, when war came, would become the Eighth Army.
On paper, it was elegant.
In practice, it was everything.
He had three Army Corps:
I Corps.
XVII Corps.
XX Corps.
The hard spine of East Prussia, or well it was at the moment merely it's garrison force.
In peacetime that meant roughly a hundred thousand men—active soldiers, trained, drilled, garrisoned. Not millions. Not yet.
But they were real.
They ate. They marched. They spent their free time with their families. They listened to orders. And they were definitely not some video game unit's he intended to sacrifice needlessly.
Three corps—nearly a sixth of the German Army's active strength.
And more importantly—
These were the men who would not be reinforced first when war began.
These were the men expected to hold.
He crossed his arms and leaned closer to the mirror, eyes narrowing.
"When the Schlieffen Plan activates," he murmured, "everyone looks west."
France.
Belgium.
Paris.
The maps, the speeches, the glory—everything pointed westward like a magnet.
And the East?
The East was meant to wait.
The Eighth Army's role—his future army's role—wasn't to do parades in enemy capitals or carve legends into history books. It was to endure. To bend without breaking. To delay, maneuver, bleed the Russians just enough to survive—
—long enough for the western hammer to fall.
He knew how it went in the other timeline.
He remembered the panic.
The frantic rail transfers.
The sudden fear for East Prussia.
The stripping of formations from the West at exactly the wrong moment.
He remembered the cost of that mistake.
Also Moltke the Younger's eyes in the meeting had been—tight, unreadable. The way his jaw had clenched when the Kaiser spoke Oskar's name aloud.
Yeah.
Moltke hated him being assigned this role.
And the previous Inspector—Prince Friedrich Leopold—had worn discipline like armor. Perfect posture. Perfect obedience. But Oskar had seen it.
The flicker.
The faintest flash of offense when imperial will displaced him.
A man removed not for failure, but for relevance.
Too polite to object.
Too proud to forgive.
"Well," Oskar said, straightening slightly. "Sorry, gentlemen."
Not really.
He turned a fraction, studying the uniform from another angle. The cut. The weight. The way it changed the man wearing it.
This wasn't cloth.
It was history stitched into shape.
The irony didn't escape him.
General of the East.
A Chinese man's soul, torn from one life and sewn into the body of a Prussian crown prince—now entrusted with Germany's most exposed frontier.
If anyone in that mirror-lined world knew the truth, they wouldn't laugh.
They'd choke.
The border.
God, the border.
He closed his eyes and let the map rise in his mind.
East Prussia—an stretch of German land that was essentially surrounded by danger. Hundreds of kilometers of exposed frontier. Lakes and marshlands that could shield or trap you. Forests thick enough to hide entire corps. Rail lines that could save you in one hour… or doom you in the next if you miscalculated.
And beyond it?
The Russian Empire.
Endless manpower.
Slow, yes—but vast. A tide that didn't need brilliance, only persistence. One that could afford mistakes as long as it kept coming.
Austria-Hungary would be there.
He snorted softly.
In theory.
In practice… he remembered exactly how useful they had been.
Which meant it would fall to him.
A twenty-year-old prince.
With one army.
One army alone.
Tasked with absorbing the opening pressure of the largest land empire on Earth.
Could he do it?
Oskar opened his eyes and stared at his reflection.
The uniform was great, but it did not wash away his troubles at all.
But the man wearing it smiled nonetheless.
"I didn't come back to this world to play it safe," he said quietly. "And I didn't take this post to lose."
He reached up, adjusted the cap, and settled it firmly on his head.
The gesture felt final.
Then he let his hand fall from the cap.
The brim sat firm. The uniform held its shape. The man in the mirror looked like he belonged to history.
He turned.
Tanya stood to his left. Anna to his right.
They were both dressed beautifully—no longer merely "his women," but the unmistakable heart of his household, the kind of presence that made servants lower their eyes and old nobles swallow opinions.
Between them, the children gathered like a small court of their own.
On Tanya's side, three little boys waddled forward in tiny military uniforms—miniature tunics, tiny belts, little caps that never quite sat straight no matter how many times a mother tried to fix them. They marched with absolute seriousness, as if the fate of Europe depended on reaching the door first.
Tanya held the infant boy in her arms—wrapped warm, small face half-hidden, the child's gaze drifting lazily like a prince who had not yet learned he was a prince.
On Anna's side, three little girls wobbled along in princess-like dresses, ribbons and soft layers swaying with each determined step. Their cheeks were pink from warmth and excitement, their eyes wide with the magic of it all. Anna carried the infant girl, bundled close, a small sleeping weight against her chest.
Oskar looked at them—at the family he'd somehow built in the middle of empire and scandal—and for a moment the world outside the walls felt far away.
Tanya lifted an eyebrow.
"Well?" she asked, the faintest hint of teasing in her voice. "Is the East saved now that you have your cap on?"
Oskar snorted softly.
He stepped forward and kissed the top of the infant's head—first Tanya's baby, then Anna's—quick, gentle gestures that still carried the weight of a vow.
"The East will hold," he said simply.
Not as a boast.
As an order to the universe.
Then he reached down, ruffled one boy's cap into an even worse angle, and pointed toward the door.
"Alright," he said. "We are late, let's go."
That made the boys straighten even harder, as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the phrase.
They moved out with him—Oskar first, as always, the lead. Tanya and Anna flanking him like banners made flesh. The children followed in two cheerful lines that were not really lines at all—more like a wobbling invasion.
The door opened.
The corridor swallowed them in gold and heat.
They passed the first doors, then the second—heavier ones—where the Eternal Guard stood in silent discipline. Gray steel. Black coats. Faces hidden.
As Oskar approached, they struck one fist to the heart.
A salute that wasn't merely respect.
It was a promise.
We will die before you fall.
Oskar nodded once in return.
Then he walked on.
And while his children toddled beside him like tiny nobles and tiny soldiers, the Emperor's palace around them suddenly felt less like a home and more like a machine—warm, polished, beautiful, relentlessly expensive.
Because the truth was—
He had just agreed to fund something that would swallow money like a furnace.
Three Army Corps.
I Corps.
XVII Corps.
XX Corps.
The spine of East Prussia. A hundred thousand men in peacetime—then more, when war came. A hundred thousand mouths that would become a million worries if he did not build the supply lines first.
And that was only the beginning.
He had also promised to modernize the Imperial police—turning them into something that could hold streets and rail lines and bridges when war tried to turn Germany inward. A disciplined militia in waiting. An internal shield.
It was… a lot.
A vast task.
One that would crush an ordinary man under its weight.
But Oskar hadn't started preparing yesterday.
He'd been preparing for five years.
Five years of building the Oskar Industrial Group. Five years of learning. Five years of good steady progress to make Germany as strong as it could possibly be.
And he hadn't just prepared Germany.
He had prepared the region of East Prussia as well.
Because he knew what East Prussia was.
A map-shaped wound.
Not because its people were weak—its population was German, loyal, disciplined—but because the land itself was treacherous. East Prussia jutted eastward like a clenched fist, a bulge of German territory pushed deep toward Russia. Its connection to the rest of the Empire was narrow and fragile—a corridor that could be severed by a single well-placed thrust.
On the map it looked manageable.
On the ground it was a trap waiting to close.
If an enemy pressed from the south while another drove in from the east, the province could be cut off in one brutal movement—rail lines severed, depots isolated, retreat routes strangled.
What remained would not be a frontline.
It would be a pocket.
Every garrison, every timetable, every fortress and rail junction existed to answer the same question:
How do you fight when the ground itself wants to encircle you?
East Prussia was not a shield behind Germany.
It was a salient—one that could anchor the eastern defense…
…or be bitten off entirely.
But East Prussia mattered for a deeper reason too—one not measured in corps counts or marks.
It was the symbolic heart of "Prussia."
Before there was a German Empire, before there was even a Prussian pride that men wore like a second uniform, this land had been Old Prussia—Baltic pagan peoples, conquered by the Teutonic Order, then colonized, Christianized, and Germanized until the old language and old gods were pushed into silence and finally into disappearance.
Over centuries, settlers replaced the past.
The older identity didn't vanish in a single day. It dissolved—slowly—into soil and memory.
And from that harsh frontier, Prussia rose: first a duchy, then a kingdom, then the force that unified Germany through discipline and steel.
For the Hohenzollerns, East Prussia was an origin story.
A proof.
A myth made real.
A place where their right to rule felt written in blood, endurance, and survival.
And for Oskar…
The irony was sharp enough to be funny—if it didn't carry so much weight.
He spoke of unity: one language, one culture, one faith—Germany as a single body.
Yet the very "Prussian" identity he inherited was itself the result of conquest and transformation. A story of people changing into something new, whether by pressure, necessity, or time.
And he—he was not German at all.
Not at the beginning.
Not inside.
A modern Chinese man's soul, transplanted into a Prussian prince.
But Buddhism had taught him something simple, something merciless and strangely comforting:
Do not hate the past.
Do not worship it either.
Do not cling to it so tightly you cannot move.
The past should remain—present in knowledge, present in memory—because it teaches what pain costs and what mistakes repeat.
But the past was not meant to be a chain around the future.
If there was a better way, you took the better way.
Not because you despised what came before—
but because suffering was pointless when it could be reduced.
And that was the seed of his foolish dream—his idealist, impossible dream:
A world where people fought less because they understood each other more. A world where language did not become a wall, where religion was not a knife, where culture was not a banner to kill under.
One people, one tongue, one shared way of life—not as supremacy…
…but as fewer reasons to hate.
He knew it wouldn't solve everything.
Humans could fight over anything.
But if you took away the easiest excuses—tribe against tribe, faith against faith, language against language—then maybe you took away enough friction for peace to have a chance to grow.
At the end of the day, most people wanted the same things:
A roof.
Warmth.
Food.
A family.
A life with enough dignity and freedom to breathe.
And if unity could buy that—if unity could reduce the number of graves—
Then yes.
He would push for it.
Not with hatred.
With stubborn hope.
And now, because East Prussia had no great natural resources, he had turned it into something else.
A breadbasket.
He had bought land there. Invested heavily. Poured money into farms that had once been proud but exhausted. Greenway tractors roamed the fields like metal beasts. Modern methods spread from estate to estate because Oskar had subsidized them, forced efficiency into places that still lived like the last century.
And everywhere he could, he planted food as if planting was an act of survival, because it was.
Edible plants along roads.
Edible plants in parks.
Edible plants in open spaces near towns and cities.
Not pretty flowers.
Food.
Because soldiers did not march on speeches.
They marched on calories.
And when war came—when the East became hungry and desperate—his men would not starve the way armies in history had starved.
If his army pushed, it would push fed.
If it held, it would hold fed.
It would not be Napoleon's march to Moscow.
It would be a controlled shove—force Russia back beyond the immediate threat, beyond the borderlands, beyond the places that would otherwise bleed Germany white.
Hold the line.
Push back enough.
Stop.
That was the plan.
That was why he had secured the Eighth Army's future.
Because East Prussia was where he could control the damage if the war came in this timeline too.
If the East panicked, Berlin would beg for troops.
If Berlin sent troops, the right wing in France would weaken.
And if the right wing weakened…
The future he remembered would repeat itself.
From Königsberg, he intended to do the impossible:
Hold the East hard enough—clever enough—that Moltke would have no excuse to bleed the West.
And if Moltke failed anyway—
Oskar would be there, close enough to see it, high enough to stop it.
And if the old man tried to sabotage the war out of pride or panic…
Oskar's mouth tightened into something that wasn't a smile.
He wouldn't just complain.
He would take the wheel.
---
They reached the end of the corridor.
The light changed there—brighter, warmer, spilling out from the tall doors ahead. Music drifted faintly through the seams: strings tuning, laughter rising and falling, the low hum of hundreds of voices waiting for the night to begin.
And standing there, just before the doors, were the Emperor and the Empress, along with Oskar's brothers and sister Louise, minus his eldest brother Wilhelm.
Wilhelm II stood straight despite the years, uniform immaculate, medals catching the light. The Empress rested her hand lightly on his arm, composed as ever, her gaze softening when it fell on the children and sharpening again when it lifted to Oskar.
For a moment, no one moved.
This was not just a family gathering.
This was a picture.
One that would be remembered.
Oskar slowed and stepped forward, instinctively, leaving Tanya and Anna half a step behind with the children. He moved to his father's side, standing where a Crown Prince was meant to stand.
Wilhelm looked at him—really looked at him.
Not at the uniform.
Not at the insignia.
At the man wearing them.
"Oskar," the Kaiser said quietly, so that only the two of them could hear, "have you truly decided?"
Oskar did not answer at once.
Wilhelm continued, voice low, stripped of ceremony.
"You could still step back. I could issue another order. Appoint you to something safer. Something less… exposed."
His mustache twitched once.
"The East will be under terrible pressure when war comes. You know the plan as well as I do."
Oskar nodded.
"I do."
Wilhelm's eyes did not leave his face.
"Russia's mobilization may be slow," the Kaiser said, "but their standing army is vast. When war breaks out, they will strike East Prussia first. They will come in numbers. And you will not have the luxury of immediate reinforcement."
There was no bluster in his voice now.
Only concern.
"Do not expect much help from Austria-Hungary," Wilhelm added bluntly. "If they manage to hold their own without us, it will already be a miracle."
Oskar allowed himself a faint, knowing smile.
"I'm aware, Father."
Wilhelm searched his expression.
"And you are still willing to take this burden?"
Oskar met his gaze without hesitation.
"Yes."
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Certain.
Wilhelm studied him for another long moment, as if weighing not just the decision, but every path that had led here.
Then he nodded once.
"Very well," he said. "Since you have chosen, I will not try to stop you."
A pause.
"I trust you, Oskar."
The words were simple.
But they landed heavier than any decree.
Wilhelm straightened slightly, the Emperor returning as the father stepped aside.
"Now," he said, gesturing toward the doors, "are you ready to meet our guests? Our friends?"
Oskar glanced back.
Tanya stood calm and radiant, the infant in her arms blinking slowly beneath the lights. The three little boys beside her tried very hard to stand at attention, with wildly different interpretations of what that meant.
Anna smiled, composed, the infant girl asleep against her chest while the three little girls at her side clutched her dress and peered at the great doors with open wonder.
Oskar felt something steady in his chest.
"Yes," he said. "Let's go have a magnificent New Year's Eve."
He allowed himself a hint of warmth.
"And welcome in 1909 properly."
Wilhelm smiled faintly.
"Then let us not keep history waiting."
The Empress nodded to the guards.
The doors opened.
Light, music, and warmth poured out into the corridor as the Imperial family stepped forward together—father, son, wives, children, banners of past and future moving as one.
And somewhere, far beyond the palace walls, the last year of the old world began to die.