In January 2010, the center of Sichuan CD.

The pouring rain tore through the dark sky with flashes of light, shaking passers-by with fear. At the intersection of Hongzhaobi Street and Dongchenggen Street, the wide road is crowded with cars, dense and unable to move. The restless car owner turned on his headlights, flicking the steering wheel back and forth, looking for gaps in the traffic, hoping to get a parking space and a half in advance. In the car queue that could not be seen from the front and back, Zhu Pingjing sat peacefully in the car, his fingers unconsciously knocking on the steering wheel. The front window wipers swayed rhythmically from side to side, and the bright red brake lights of the front car flashed dimly or clearly in front of Zhu Pingjing.

"I told you not to go this way!" Luo Yuhong slanted her eyes and hated her husband next to her, "With such a heavy rain, most of the tunnels under Dongchenggen Street have entered the water again!" Luo Yuhong paused as she spoke, feeling that the husband next to her was not serious, so she continued to emphasize: "Even if the car is not blocked, you are not allowed to go down the tunnel." What happens if there is water in the tunnel? There's nothing going on right now! When the car floated on the water, you climbed the sunroof without conscience and ran away, throwing us in the car. I can't climb out now. Hey, did you hear that? ”

Zhu Pingjing looked sideways at his wife's bulging belly, and a kind and kind smile habitually appeared on his face: "I want it!" No problem! My wife has the final say! In front of us we don't turn right, go straight to the second ring road, and take a detour home. ”

"If you don't listen to your wife, you will suffer in front of you. When have I ever cheated you? Luo Yuhong was obviously satisfied with Zhu Ping's respectful attitude. She took her husband's free hand over and gently placed it on her stomach and stroked it. There is a strange connection between a man's hand, a woman's skin, and a new life, like a piece of tape glued together.

Zhu Pingjing didn't say a word, and let his wife fiddle. He was sneering at his wife's self-feeling good: "Haven't you ever cheated on your husband? Last time, you suspected that Xiao Jiang in the printing room was a junior, does it count as a fuss to someone's office? ”

Zhu Pingjing and Luo Yuhong are CD natives, and the other is Leshan people who floated to CD many years ago. The two are the same age, and Luo Yuhong is even older - Zhu Pingjing's birthday is in October of 70, and Luo Yu is in January of the same year, or the lunar calendar. According to the Gregorian calendar, Luo Yu is at the end of sixty-nine years, nearly a year older than Zhu Pingjing. So the two are different, Zhu Pingjing is a dog, and Luo Yu is a chicken.

One is a dog and the other is a chicken, which is what the so-called fortune teller calls "chicken and dog restless". It has been fifteen years since the two realized each other, fighting, loving and killing each other, and there are a lot of jokes, but in general, Zhu Pingjing gave in. Zhu Pingjing believes that the main reasons for the prosperity of yin and yang are that he is connived at because of love, and second, Luo Yuhong is too strong. She is in charge of affairs and money, including Zhu Pingjing's private money. Of course, Luo Yuhong earns several times more money than Zhu Pingjing, which is also the reason why she is strong. The two gave up several opportunities to have children for the sake of their careers, and they have no children until now. Now Luo Yuhong's belly is their hope, maybe the only hope for the two of them in this life.

"Women, naturally you have to be proud. Not to mention a pregnant woman. Zhu Pingjing recalled his wife's satisfied expression just now, and comforted himself. Recently, there is reliable grapevine that Zhu Pingjing's hope of being promoted to the S Committee is yellow, and Zhu Pingjing is trying to win a department-level researcher, and then go to a certain district and county to take up a temporary job to exercise - of course, he will miss his wife's due date. is already forty years old, and he is still a deputy department, which means that in officialdom, his career is at the end and there is no hope for promotion.

Thinking of his career, Zhu Pingjing couldn't help but tighten his teeth: "After graduating from university, I have been working at the grassroots level for more than ten years, changed two state-owned enterprises, and was transferred to the S Committee with great difficulty. Is it fucking easy for me to start over with seniority from a deputy section member? "The boss is a bastard, Zhu Pingjing wants to play a slippery head and not get wet, but unfortunately he still offended his boss." If they are not of my race, their hearts will be different", and officialdom is no exception. If you don't participate, it means that you refuse to submit a petition. So Zhu Pingjing's journey was bumpy and bumpy everywhere.

"That bastard surnamed Zhang! It's time to pull it out and peel the grass! The people's fat and the people's ointment, Erlu! Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang still killed corrupt officials, why can't we open the killing ring and line up to shoot a few? What exactly are our ideals and beliefs? What is the goal of our sworn life! Zhu Pingjing took a deep breath and spewed out a cavity of turbid air in his chest. Maybe I'm too naïve, it's a money-first society, where realism is popular and business heroes are admired. If you are rich, you are a big brother, who will talk to you about life and ideals? Do you think everyone is brain-dead? Zhu Pingjing took another deep breath and glanced at his wife: "In recent months, my wife has become more ruddy than before, and it seems that she is still supported by foreign and private enterprises." Thankfully, I didn't put my eggs in one basket. ”

Luo Yuhong didn't expect that she would have a psychological healing effect on her husband. She is really in a good mood now, the main reason is that the results of the examination in the hospital just now are very ideal, and it is a B-ultrasound quietly played by the trust. When an elderly woman gives birth, both mother and child are at great risk. The results of the examination came out, the fetus was developing well, and the sex could be clearly distinguished, and it was a daughter. He has always liked his daughter, and he likes her caring and docile her. The only pity is that it was not photographed, because the doctor did not work hard, for fear that the two of them would accidentally leak out and cause trouble for themselves. There is still a month and a half left in the due date, as long as you persist in it, a cute baby will be born! The tertiary hospital is always crowded, it is very troublesome to run to the hospital for prenatal examination, Zhu Pingjing has to ask for leave, and there is a traffic jam on the road, but it is all worth it, because the focus is on the safety of the mother and daughter.

"What I have is time." Luo Yuhong thought happily. The foreign-funded pharmaceutical company where she now works has a frighteningly high profit from product sales, and its profit margin is close to selling white powder. Her HK boss, the director who speaks English at any time and has a loose stomach when he gets a little spicy, is very much like a traditional Chinese in handling interpersonal relationships, and adds an extra half a year of leave to her Sichuan assistant in addition to the maternity leave required by Chinese law. Thinking about these happy things, Luo Yuhong couldn't help but gently hold Zhu Pingjing's hand, hoping to share her excitement with her husband telepathically.

"Paid childbirth, perfect!" Just as Luo Yuhong was immersed in joy, a bright flash of light tore through the sky, and a miserable white magic hand stretched out from the sky, suddenly grabbing their car.

On the fifteenth day of the thirteenth month of Chongzhen, that is, on the seventh day and night of the first month of the first month of 1640 A.D., CD House, the same wind and rain, the same thunder and lightning.

On the open square in front of the outermost gate ---- Lingxing Gate in the south of the Shu Palace, there were no pedestrians in sight, and a few honor guards were hurriedly heading towards the Shu Palace. Zhu Pingjin, the fifteen-year-old son of the King of Shu in the Ming Dynasty and the legal heir of the Shu Domain, curled up in a sedan chair, enduring the bumps and the cold wind that opened the sedan curtain from time to time. A fishy yin wind swept into the sedan chair, making Zhu Pingjin shiver.

Almost at the same time, Zhang Xianzhong, the famous giant thief chief of the Ming Empire, was leading a peasant rebel army to brave the rain and rush north in the direction of the provincial capital CDFU, the center of Shu. After several days of fierce fighting, they finally broke through Renshou County yesterday, killed Liu Sance, the magistrate, and slaughtered the whole city according to Zhang Xianzhong's pre-war oath.

When the main force of the rebel army advanced north, the advance force of more than 1,000 people had secretly rushed to CD Mansion in advance, hiding in the houses or grass under the western city wall. The advance force dug the city with dozens of people first, and dozens of others were ready to replace them in the back, while the large group of men and horses quietly hid a hundred paces away, enduring the invasion of hunger and cold, and watched the hazy figures of the brothers in front of them sway.

It is not complicated to dig a city and deal with a city wall like CD Mansion that has been in disrepair for a long time. The soldiers first used knives to clean up the debris in the cracks of the city bricks, leaving room for the spear tip to be wedged in, and then held the spear shaft and shook it up and down, left and right, loosened the city bricks, and then used the knife to pry it off piece by piece.

After nearly 300 years of erosion and gravity squeezing, the bricks of CD House have become crumbling, and the brick joints have become no longer compact, and in some places they are so big that they can even be inserted into fists. Therefore, the progress of the excavation of the city was very fast, and in less than an hour, they had already peeled off a large piece of bricks, revealing the rammed earth inside the city walls. Now, the tools they are most familiar with, the hoe and the iron tip, have finally come in handy.

No one in the city-digging procession spoke, but they were not particularly afraid of the officers and soldiers on the city walls finding out. With the laxity of the official and military defenses, the soldiers on guard should have taken refuge in the grass huts to avoid the rain and wind, and they should not have discovered the night raids of the rebels. Besides, the lanterns and torches of the officers and soldiers have been blown out by the wind and rain, and the sound of digging has been suppressed by the sound of the wind and rain. (Note 1)

The night rain of the thieves attacked, and Shu was in danger. But for the hero and heroine of the story, this is a day of twisting fate; For the Ming Dynasty in turmoil, this is a day of turning fate; For the world civilization that fell into the "crisis of the seventeenth century" due to the Xiaoice Age, it was also a turning point of fate.

The earth is eternally revolving, from west to east. At this time, thousands of miles away in Western Europe, Charles I, the tragic heir of the Stuart dynasty, was just forty years old. He was forced to reinstate the long-closed parliament in order to raise pay for the British army fighting in Scotland, thus opening a Pandora's box of parliamentary politics. After the Anglo-Dutch War, the burning of London, and the Black Death, the British Empire placed its hope of escaping the crisis on the enormous benefits of the Age of Discovery, and on the road of no return for global expansion. Charles I did not know, because he ignored the interests of the British maritime merchants and did not invest the limited treasury funds in the construction of the navy in time, creating an irreparable rift between the parliament, which represented the interests of all classes of England, and him, the hereditary monarch. It seems only a matter of time before the two finally break up and go to war.

The earth continues to turn. In the East of Western Europe, outside the desolate borders of the war-torn Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, a barbaric empire that had entered an era of no authority because of its disconnected heirs, after a long history of imposters-filled courts, finally elected a serious tsar: Mikhail Romanov, the first monarch of the Romanov dynasty. In the last years of this monarch, a large number of Russians, who wanted to get rich and thirsty for adventure, with naked encouragement from the court, began to cross the Ural Mountains, starting from Kazan, which Ivan the Terrible had destroyed with his own hands, and eastward through the boundless Siberian wilderness. They will eventually complete this epic and difficult journey, starting an ambiguous relationship of love and hate with a distant and ancient eastern power.

The earth continued to rotate and came to the capital of the Ming Dynasty. A middle-aged man who was made old and decrepit by the double pressure of work and spirit stood alone in a corner of the platform of the Qianqing Palace, staring at the night sky for a long time. He was looking at the heavens, trying to find the eternal star in the north, to see the star that represented the fate of himself and his entire dynasty; He is also praying, praying that the fate of himself and the entire dynasty can be "revived" as soon as possible.

At this moment, a meteor streaked across the sky. At the moment when the middle-aged man blinked, the star next to the Emperor Star flashed violently, bursting out with dazzling light!

Note 1: "Shu Bi" said that the time when Zhang Xianzhong dug the city did not occur when Chongzhen went north to Deyang in the 13th year of Layue, but when Chongzhen went south from northern Sichuan to southern Sichuan in the autumn of 13th year. The rebel army almost cut through the city wall, but was beaten out by Dong Bu's Tusi soldiers and killed 10,000 people. Mr. Gu Cheng did not accept this statement. Dong Bu Tusi, also known as Muping Tusi or Baoxing Toast, one of the eighteen Tusi of Jiarong in the Qing Dynasty, in Baoxing County, Ya'an City.