Astronomical Scholar of the Ming Dynasty

The fourteenth year of the Zhengtong reign, Great Ming.

In early August, with autumn just beginning, the air was growing cooler.

“To flee, or not to flee?”

Inside a modest farmhouse in the western quarter of the capital, Xue Rui was weighing a question that concerned his very life.

Today was the second day of the eighth lunar month, less than half a month away from the Tumu Crisis. Soon, the Oirat army would besiege the capital, aiming to conquer it and overthrow Ming rule.

It would end in a pyrrhic victory for the defenders of Beijing.

This, Xue Rui knew well. The disastrous defeat at Tumu would claim two hundred thousand of Ming’s elite troops. The ensuing defense of Beijing would be won only by a desperate stand of the old, the sick, the infirm, and newly conscripted soldiers, fighting with their backs against the wall.

As an ordinary citizen, Xue Rui could not predict what the war would bring to his doorstep.

As for stopping the defeat at Tumu, becoming the savior of the dynasty, and earning the adulation of the masses?

That was out of the question—far too late for that.

Now he was just a commoner, possessing nothing more than some modern knowledge in his mind. Powerless and without influence, he could not sway a single decision in the imperial court.

Worse still, his father—his so-called “cheap father,” Xue Yuanhao—had already been seized and imprisoned by the powerful eunuch Wang Zhen.

Xue Yuanhao was an apprentice astronomer at the Directorate of Astronomy. Amidst the tumult of the Emperor’s m