明朝中兴实录
In the Chongzhen years of the late Ming, the Great Ming Empire was already a house in a storm. In 1644, Li Zicheng took Beijing; the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself; the dynasty collapsed. At Shanhai Pass, the frontier commander Wu Sangui—caught between national ruin and private grievance—brought the Qing armies through the gates and allied with Dorgon. At Yipianshi, their combined forces shattered the Shun. The Qing rode the momentum into Beijing, and history, as it was meant to be, slid toward the track of three centuries of foreign rule.
But in this parallel world, fate veers after the entry through the Pass.
The Manchu Qing drive their conquest forward with massacre and iron pressure—only to kindle a fiercer resistance than they anticipated. Ming loyalists, peasant righteous bands, local gentry, and common folk, forged in blood and fire, begin to coalesce with startling speed. What had been scattered, rival struggles harden into a single enmity, a single cause, until an anti-Qing tide rises across the realm. The Qing may surge deep into the heartland, but they are steadily drawn into a long, brutal war of attrition: for every city they seize, new beacon fires flare in their rear; for every suppression, the hatred spreads wider—and with it, the will to unite.
When “dynastic succession” is forced to escalate into a war of “national survival,” the resisting forces, tempered by chaos, hammer out new alliances, new commanders, new orders. In the end, this continent-spanning blood war is no longer merely a contest of banners under the slogan of restoring the Ming. It becomes a road of revival—by which the Han reclaim the Central Plains and rewrite the direction of history itself. Through repeated decisive battles and relentless counteroffensives, the Qing’s seemingly inevitable seizure of the realm is reversed. The old capital shines again; rivers and mountains return to their people—and from the smoke of war a new history is born:
a world in which the Ming did not perish to the Qing.
