In 1914, a whole generation would be drawn into the world's first mass war. More than seventy million men from over twenty countries would be called into military service, and as they entered the enormous mass armies of the new industrial age, they would increasingly become little more than numbers in a war of numbers. Over the following four years, men would be slaughtered more quickly, and often for less gain, than ever before. Fields would be torn apart by trenches cutting through the earth like great wounds, surrounded by shell holes and artillery craters stretching as far as the eye could see. At sea, men would drown inside great steel warships, while others would learn for the first time how to hunt and kill one another in the skies. And those who survived bullets and shells would still die—of hunger behind blockades, of disease in hospitals, of infection in mud, of exhaustion and cold.
Neighborhoods would empty, streets would fill with widows, and an entire age would come home missing arms, missing faces, missing souls—if it came home at all. The old crowns would not survive either.
The monarchies of Europe would collapse the way old stone collapses: not with glory, but with cracking, panic, and shame. Germany's Hohenzollern dynasty would be driven into exile, leaving behind a wounded nation that—within a generation—would rise again harder, angrier, and better at killing, dragging the world into another war even worse than the first.
Men once believed the Great War would cure humanity of violence—that no one could witness such bloodshed and still choose war again. History laughed at them. For war never truly changes. It only refines itself, finds new tools, and waits for new bodies to fill the trenches.
But in the year 1904, none of that had yet come to pass. The world still stood quiet, still hopeful, still convinced that progress meant safety.
Europe believed itself civilized. Germany, in particular, looked toward the future with confidence. Factories grew louder, railways longer, cities brighter. Science promised miracles. Industry promised wealth. The army drilled with pride. The navy expanded, hull by hull, like a steel prayer. Colonies stretched outward across maps, colored neatly in ink, and life, for many, was getting better.
Berlin pulsed with ambition, a modern capital rising fast. Just beyond it lay Potsdam—calmer, cleaner, wrapped in order and tradition. A city of officers and gardens and palaces, where history felt finished, settled, safe.
At the heart of it stood the Neues Palais, home of the Hohenzollerns.
In later centuries, it would become a museum—clean, quiet, and politely dead. Tourists would drift through its halls in soft-soled shoes, staring more at their own reflections than at the gilding above them. School groups would shuffle past tapestries and portraits like cattle being counted, children half-listening while their minds lived elsewhere. Parents would push prams over polished floors, whispering facts they barely remembered while someone in the back raised a phone and took a picture for people who weren't there.
The palace would survive, but only as a backdrop: a pretty shell to collect entry fees, a place of greatness reduced to a location tag. And the visitors would miss what it meant.
They would not feel the weight of the men who built this place with war and marriage and ruthless patience. They would not understand what it took to forge a nation out of a hundred jealous fragments—how much blood had been poured, how many lives spent, how much pride hammered into law and steel until "Germany" stopped being a word and became a power. They would walk through rooms born from sacrifice as if they were strolling a shopping arcade, as if history were just decoration.
But still, in mid-August of 1904, that humiliation had not yet come to pass. The palace still lived. It breathed empire. The Kaiser still roamed its halls like a crowned bear, his two youngest children still sprinted laughing through corridors paved in polished pride, and the Great War—the end of everything—was still ten quiet years away.
Oskar knew all of this, and yet, standing there beneath the stars, he had no idea what to do with any of it.
The palace gardens stretched around him, silvered by moonlight beneath the warm August sky. Hedgerows stood dark and heavy with leaves, and the branches above them stirred softly whenever the night breeze passed through. The day's heat still lingered faintly in the earth and stone, though the air had cooled enough to make the gardens pleasant. Ahead, the lake lay perfectly still, a sheet of black glass holding the stars more clearly than the sky itself. Oskar stood knee-deep in its waters.
Behind him, swaying gently in the breeze like a flag of stubborn defiance, hung the usual rope of knotted bedsheets—his escape route from the third-floor window of the Neues Palais. Another quiet midnight retreat, another small rebellion against the ridiculous idea that he needed to be monitored like some moody porcelain heir with a suicide complex.
He hated the lack of privacy, hated the constant presence of eyes. The servants never stopped watching, never stopped hovering, and every glance felt like judgment even when it wasn't. The maids were the worst. They would stop talking the second he entered a room, or worse, they would giggle—furtive, breathy little giggles that made his stomach twist. He never knew what they were laughing about. Probably him. Probably how weird he seemed, how foreign he still sounded, how badly he faked normal.
Sometimes he caught them sneaking glances at him when he walked by shirtless after morning drills, and that only made things worse. He could never tell whether they were mocking him or simply being women. Either possibility made his skin itch.
Especially Tanya.
She was his personal maid: young, sharp-eyed, terrifyingly competent, and beautiful too, which did not help. She doted on him in a way that felt halfway between nurse and warden, as if she didn't trust him to bathe, dress, or breathe without guidance. He appreciated her and respected her, but he also hated the way she made him feel small.
He hated how she appeared in doorways uninvited, how she folded his clothes as though he couldn't handle buttons, and how she looked at him with actual concern in her eyes. He didn't need her concern, and he didn't need help. He was a man—reincarnated or not—and he could handle a soap bar and a uniform without maternal supervision.
So he ran. Again and again, whenever the palace became too much, he ran.
And now, once more, he stood alone in the lake, the cool water drawing the last of the day's heat from his skin while the mild August air settled around him. His breathing was slow and deliberate as he tried to steady himself, listening to the faint rustle of leaves along the shore and the quiet sounds of the summer night.
The water had startled him the first few times he came here, especially after the warmth of the day, but he was accustomed to it now—to stripping down, washing in silence, and hanging his clothes from a tree branch like some vagabond prince. Not because it was dignified, and not because it made any sense, but because it was one of the few things that still made him feel as though he belonged to himself.
Out here there were no maids, no questions, and no pitying looks from women. There was only cool water, moonlight, the soft movement of leaves in the summer breeze, and the quiet, gnawing knowledge that the man reflected in the lake did not really belong to him at all, but was some unfamiliar, monstrous, glorious freak of a man.
He hadn't always looked like this.
When he'd first woken up in this world gasping for air, confused and strapped into this stranger's body, he'd been unimpressive. He had looked almost like a dead man, thin and pale, though still vaguely aristocratic in a pasty sort of way that came from too much indoor air and too little protein. Pretty cheekbones, soft hands, lungs that wheezed like an asthmatic cat whenever they encountered too many stairs.
Then came the pushups, the runs, the squats, the desperate prison-cell workouts in his royal chamber every morning and night, repeated like ritual and pursued like obsession. He wasn't training to look good. He was training to survive.
And the body had responded too well, too fast, as though it had been engineered for this—as though some divine gym bro had spiked his bloodstream with liquid steroids and then told his muscles, "Grow, coward."
Now, approximately one year later, standing beneath the moonlight on a warm August night, he looked like the bastard child of a Roman demigod and a Mister Olympia finalist: sculpted, massive, and most definitely eye-catching.
Even the lake water refused to pull away, droplets were clinging, trapped in the valleys between muscle as if even gravity had forgotten how to work around him.
His neck was thick, solid, anchoring his head like it had been reinforced. It rolled seamlessly into broad shoulders, round and heavy, carrying a quiet, contained violence in every slight shift. There was no wasted space, no softness left.
His chest rose wide and full, carved deep down the center, each breath controlled, steady, powerful. The muscle wasn't just large—it was complete, shaped with a precision that bordered on unnatural. Water traced along it, slipping lower, catching along the hard divisions of his torso.
His core followed like a deliberate design—each segment cut clean, defined without effort, an eight-pack that didn't flex so much as exist. Lower still, the lines narrowed sharply into a tight V, disappearing into his hips with a dangerous kind of promise.
His arms hung loose at his sides, relaxed, but heavy with quiet strength. Thick, veined, coiled beneath the surface like something waiting rather than something resting. Every movement carried weight, intention, inevitability.
And his legs were like pillars. Rooted into the lakebed without shift or strain, built not for show but for force. Strength layered upon strength, capable of driving forward or holding ground without question. The kind of foundation that made everything above it inevitable.
And between his legs was a third limb. It just hung there with its own presence, heavy, unapologetic.
The Banana Blaster Nine Thousand.
He hadn't meant to name it. The words just slipped out one night after a swim, when he caught a full reflection in the lake. He had stopped, stared at it and whispered:
"Jesus Christ."
Then quieter, "Banana Blaster... what the fuck."
It wasn't just long or thick. It was absurd. A biological liability. An architectural design flaw.
Sitting to pee had become a tactical nightmare. Wearing certain trousers had become considerably more difficult to wear with dignity. And each morning his wood arrived like a war crime—unpredictable, aggressive, difficult to explain to the poor maids who came to "wake him gently" with fresh linens and tea.
He could see the glances. The way they giggled behind his back, or stared at the wrong place before quickly looking away. It wasn't flattering. It was hell.
And of course, dangling beneath the mighty Blaster, his Puss-Ball Twins stood guard—two round meteorites of questionable intent, now shriveling in the cool night air like traumatized hamsters hiding from God.
He sighed. Goddamn, it was a cold night, or maybe it was just his nerves getting to him. Still, he flexed—once. For himself. Just to see.
The biceps obeyed, coiling and tightening beneath his skin. Moonlight caught the hard lines of his body and turned them silver, almost like armor, while heat still radiated from him after the flex, warmth seeming to roll off his skin despite the cool water around him. Even his breath came heavy for a moment as he stared down at the dark reflection beneath him.
And damn, even distorted by rippling water and the awkward angle of his height, his face looked good.
Short, pale-blond hair clung damply to his forehead, while icy blue eyes stared back at him—sharp, cold, almost cruel. His jaw looked like it had been carved specifically to cut marble, and the thick column of his neck only made it worse. Even his Adam's apple looked unnecessarily well-defined, as though some sculptor had gotten carried away and decided his throat needed cheekbones too.
Altogether, he looked less like a normal human being and more like the recruitment poster for some fascist gym: THE FINAL FORM OF THE WHITE MAN.
And none of it was him. Not really. Because beneath the abs and the combat muscles and the warhammer in his pants, he was still Zhang-Ge. An Asian truck driver. A failed Shaolin martial arts child star turned military strategy streamer. A man with PTSD, a million unread comments, and no clue what he was doing in the body of a dead German prince.
This wasn't his body. This wasn't his palace. This wasn't even his timeline.
It had been a year, more or less. Time in this place felt slippery. The calendar was western, so mostly just a suggestion, not a fact. He still didn't know how old this body was meant to be—sixteen? Eighteen? It looked twenty. It felt thirty. Some days it felt older than civilization.
And worst of all? He had never really studied who Prince Oskar was.
He knew the Hohenzollerns. He knew the German Empire, the Kaiser, the World Wars, all the big names and events. But the Kaiser's fifth son?
Who the hell was Oskar?
As far as Zhang-Ge could remember, nobody had ever talked about him. He was barely a footnote in history, little more than a name buried somewhere in the family tree.
And now, he was him, sort of, maybe. He wasn't even sure if the real Oskar's soul was still in here, or if this was just a corpse being puppeted by his own weird, displaced consciousness. A brain transplant from a war nerd into a royal zombie. And he felt bad about that. Sort of. He didn't mean to take over.
But according to the maids and that terrifying four-eyed doctor, Prince Oskar had flatlined. He'd been dead, or, well, that's what he guessed. The body sadly didn't come with German language skills installed, or really anything else, so he didn't know.
But more importantly, what was he supposed to do? Give the body back? And even if he did… to whom?
He looked back down at his reflection. The monster stared back.
He had the body. He had some German now. He even had a sense of what was coming. He knew history—knew the alliances, the mistakes, the fuse in Sarajevo just waiting to be lit. But he didn't have a plan. Not yet, just a load of random ideas.
"Goddamn it," he muttered. "What the hell am I even supposed to do with this?"
The lake, as always, said nothing. It never did. And in that silence he found himself asking the same question again, the one that always returned when the world went quiet: Why the hell am I even here?
He wasn't anyone important, not really. No chosen hero, no brilliant intellectual, no myth. Just… him. And whenever his mind tried to prove otherwise, it slid backward, the way it always did, to the beginning of his memories—back to the first thing he could truly remember with clarity.
A camera.
Not dreams of fame, warmth, not even a happy family gathered around a table. Just a cheap camcorder and a little boy trying desperately to look cool—trying to become a Shaolin monk, the kind who could do a one-finger push-up and make grown men gasp.
The obsession had started on a rare family trip. His foster parents had taken him to a Shaolin temple once—one day out of a whole life—and that single day had branded itself into his skull. He could still see it: the courtyard, the stone, the cold air, the sound of feet striking ground with perfect rhythm.
The monks moved like iron wrapped in skin—sharp kicks that snapped like whips, stances so rooted they looked welded to the earth. Their bodies weren't pretty. They were made—forged by repetition, tempered by pain, shaped into weapons by a discipline that looked almost unreal.
On the ride home, he had stared down at his own thin arms, at the smallness of himself, and a thought had risen up simple and pure, like a vow: "I want to be like that."
Back in their peeling apartment, he stole his father's camcorder. Not to show off or to entertain anyone, but to measure himself. To record proof that he was changing—that he was becoming something.
But the footage didn't lie. He didn't break blocks or do flips. He flailed. He fell off chairs attempting backflips. His stances wobbled. His kicks looked like a drunk kid swatting flies. But he grunted and shouted and took it all painfully seriously.
His foster parents watched the footage and—for the first time ever—laughed. He didn't get it, but they did.
They saw a golden goose.
So they began uploading the clips to local platforms, at first to share, then to monetize. When one got reposted overseas with English subtitles and went mildly viral, they saw something else: people would pay for this.
English comments they couldn't read popped up: "LOL," "funny," "adorable." They leaned in.
"Do more kung fu, Gege." "Say something in English." "Don't worry about homework, this is your future."
They bought a better camera and a turtle costume. Called him talented, adorable, brilliant. They even signed him up for online English lessons. They weren't evil, he always hoped. Just young parents who saw a ladder out of poverty and chose to climb it on his back.
By his teens, their lives had changed. The old apartment was gone. Now it was all touchscreens and voice commands. "Lights on." "Shower on." No handles, no knobs, no silence.
He barely touched the real world anymore, just screens. Streaming, editing, sleeping, eating, repeat. At first they helped. Then they stopped. Once he learned how to manage the content pipeline, they handed it all to him.
But his body changed faster than the algorithm.
Cute kid doing bad kung fu? Internet gold. Awkward teen with glasses doing bad kung fu? Internet cringe.
The comments turned. "Stop pretending." "Your English sucks." "You're not a monk, you're a clown." "You donkey." People weren't laughing with him anymore, they were laughing at him.
And after the infamous "horse trick" video—where his parents had him leap off a horse and he landed straight in the hospital—his body never quite felt the same.
So he pivoted. No more Shaolin slapstick. No more spin-kicks into furniture. No more injuries for views.
He switched to gaming.
At first he was just another Asian kid yelling over shooters. Then came the rage-quit clips. Then came strategy games. He discovered maps, borders, armies. He discovered war.
He redrew continents on-screen. Built pyramids in tundras. Commanded millions with a mouse. He stopped caring about kill counts and started asking: How do I make this country economically unkillable?
The obsession returned—this time with history. His channel changed with it, becoming less "funny kid" and more armchair analyst. His Eastern fans called him Teacher War-Spear. Westerners mostly knew him as "that Asian dude who never shuts up about logistics."
He also had one genuine gift: memory. If he read something once, the important parts tended to stay with him. Knowledge went in easily, piled up quickly, and before long he was pouring it straight back out to his viewers through streams, videos, and endless arguments about history and war.
By the time he applied to university, he wasn't really chasing grades anymore. He was collecting tools. He chose engineering because, in his mind, any decent general ought to understand steel, machines, and how things were actually built. The degree itself didn't matter. What mattered was the knowledge.
Between lectures, he watched wars unfold across the world—Ethiopia, Myanmar, border skirmishes most people barely noticed. But one conflict rose above all the others: the modern war in the West, a war that seemed to contain everything at once—tanks, drones, missiles, satellites, national armies, navies, air forces, and industrial-scale slaughter on a scale he had only ever read about before.
He analyzed the war obsessively, drawing arrows across maps, breaking down offensives, mocking mistakes, and arguing endlessly about logistics, strategy, and everything the commanders should have done differently.
Then one comment appeared beneath a video: "You talk big, laoshi. But what do you actually know about war?"
Another followed soon after. "You haven't even had a real job."
Both comments gathered thousands of likes, and that stung more than he wanted to admit, mostly because there was truth in them. He had grown up surrounded by automation, screens, and convenience. For all the wars he had studied and all the battles he had dissected from behind a monitor, the most dangerous thing he had ever personally dodged was a pissed-off girl at school.
That realization bothered him. He wanted more than knowledge gathered secondhand from books, videos, maps, and reports. He wanted experience. He wanted to become someone real, someone who had actually seen the things he spent so much time talking about.
And whenever he thought about what that meant, certain names came to mind: Yue Fei. Han Xin. Napoleon. Men who had not simply sat at the top and watched the world move beneath them. They had climbed.
So Zhang-Ge made a plan.
While still at university, he got his truck driver's license. Not because he wanted to kill anyone, and not because he dreamed of becoming a soldier. He simply wanted to see war for himself.
To Zhang-Ge, logistics seemed like the best place to start. A truck driver sat near the bottom of the military ladder—important enough to go almost everywhere, but unimportant enough that a nobody like him could become one quite easily. Drivers moved between supply depots, artillery positions, field hospitals, rear bases, ruined towns, and the roads feeding the front. If he wanted to understand how a modern war actually functioned beyond maps and casualty figures, he could think of no better position from which to watch it.
So he joined a foreign volunteer unit as a logistics driver. And before long, he saw more than he had ever expected.
Endless convoys crawling along broken roads. Hidden depots tucked away from enemy eyes. Artillery moving from one firing position to another. Field hospitals established in ruined shopping centers, warehouses, and basements. Ammunition going forward, wounded men coming back, and everything in between being carried by trucks like his.
Within his first few months as a logistics driver, he had already lost three trucks.
The first hit spikes scattered across the road by enemy drones, blowing out the tires and sending the vehicle careening off the road into a ditch, damaged badly enough to be written off for the time being. The second was struck by a grenade-dropping quadcopter and left too badly damaged to continue the run. The third was caught by a swarm of suicide drones and went up in flames. Somehow, Zhang-Ge survived all three incidents, though rarely by much.
It was enough for the other volunteers to start joking that he was cursed.
"The trucks die for you," they would say.
And before long, Zhang-Ge had earned himself a nickname: the Drone Magnet.
Sometimes, though, he did more than simply drive. He volunteered for rescue runs, hauling supplies forward and wounded men back through roads that could be more dangerous than the trenches themselves. Everyone knew it, and still he went. Along the way he learned how to slap on a tourniquet, drag screaming men through mud, and keep driving with blood soaking into the seats. He saw detached limbs, burned bodies, shattered faces, and finally understood what high explosive meant when it was no longer just a term on a screen.
He also began filming the aftermath. Not the gore itself, but the people who survived it and the stories they carried. He would sit with wounded soldiers and ask simple questions: "What does war feel like?" or "When were you most afraid?" Command did not like it at first and tried to stop him, but eventually they let it continue. His channel exploded. Before long, he was no longer just "War-Spear the Analyst." Now he was the Asian guy actually inside the war.
For a time, that felt meaningful. He had wanted experience, and now he had more of it than he had ever imagined. But after nearly dying enough times, the novelty was long gone. Eventually, he decided he had seen enough and told his parents he was coming home.
They said no.
"Just a bit longer. The channel is booming. Your little siblings need this, the money."
So he stayed.
And even now, Oskar could remember the last stream with perfect clarity: the dashcam pointed down a forest road, his hands resting on the wheel as he drove through what was supposed to be the safe rear.
"I'm in the rear. Logistics cockroach, my mans. Nothing can touch me."
Then came the flash, white-hot and instantaneous. There was no pain, no sound, not even enough time to be afraid. One moment he was driving, and the next there was simply nothing.
Then he was gasping for air.
He remembered coming awake as though he had just been dragged from deep water, lungs burning while his fingers clenched around impossibly soft sheets. When his vision cleared, he found himself staring up at an enormous gilded ceiling, beautifully painted with some heavenly scene of mythic Germans and Romans hacking at one another with swords beneath clouds and golden light.
Everything around him was just as ridiculous. The enormous bed, the carved furniture, the heavy curtains, the warm candle light dancing across painted walls. Even the clothes on his body were absurdly fine, the sort of thing a nobleman, perhaps even a royal prince might wear—or at least some extremely rich bastard with exceptionally good taste.
He barely had time to wonder where the hell he was before something small and warm crashed into him.
A tiny white woman with honey-blond hair and enormous blue eyes had thrown herself onto the bed and wrapped both arms around him. He could still remember the unfamiliar softness of her body pressed against his, the warmth of her embrace, and the faint sweet scent clinging to her hair and clothes. After having spent such a long time surrounded mostly by soldiers, diesel, mud, blood, and sweat, the sensation alone had nearly short-circuited his brain.
Then she started talking.
German poured from her mouth between sobs so rapidly that he could barely even identify it as German. She might as well have been speaking gibberish.
So Zhang-Ge had simply sat there, completely stunned, awkwardly patting the distressed little woman on her honey-blond head while trying to think of something comforting to say.
Unfortunately, German had never been one of his languages.
Mandarin, obviously. English, certainly. His Russian had become fairly decent during the war. But German? He knew war movies, games, memes, a few commands, and assorted profanity.
Still, the woman eventually pulled back and looked at him through tear-filled eyes, clearly expecting him to say something.
So he did.
"Y-yes… my man. Nice day indeed."
He even nodded afterward, as though that helped.
Tanya froze, and from there, things went steadily downhill.
Only later did he manage to piece together roughly what had happened. Prince Oskar had fallen down a staircase, slipped into a coma, and eventually stopped breathing. The terrifying four-eyed doctor who still occasionally examined him had been the same physician who had pronounced him dead. As far as everyone in the palace was concerned, Oskar had genuinely died.
Then, at midnight, the corpse had gasped. And Zhang-Ge had opened its eyes.
He still wasn't entirely sure what to make of that. Someone else had died, and somehow he had taken the vacancy. It wasn't as though he'd applied for the position.
Unfortunately, being alive again proved to be the easy part.
Prince Oskar had awakened speaking broken German with the vocabulary of a foreign war-movie enthusiast. He called people regardless of gender or status "my man," mixed English and Mandarin into conversations, occasionally threw in Russian without noticing, and understood barely half of what anyone said to him. Worse, he knew almost nothing about the actual Prince Oskar whose life he was supposed to be living.
Naturally, the palace noticed.
The fall had changed him, people whispered. His mind was damaged. Something was missing. Something was wrong. Prince Oskar had survived, certainly, but he was also, to put it politely, off.
So he adapted as best he could. He learned a few safe phrases, kept his sentences short, stood straight, nodded slowly, and whenever he had absolutely no idea what someone was saying, simply stared at them as though he were thinking very deeply about it.
Somehow, that worked.
Before long, he became the quiet, cold, possibly brain-damaged prince who spoke very little, stared too much, and performed alarming amounts of calisthenics every morning. The nobility mostly left him alone, the servants learned to work around his peculiarities, and his father appeared to accept that whatever remained of Oskar was probably a lost cause best handled with patience.
The real problems came when he was alone.
Zhang-Ge had grown up with voice-controlled lights, automatic showers, and technology that did almost everything for him. During the war, when those things weren't available, he had simply lived like a caveman—rivers for bathing, bushes for everything else.
But the palace existed somewhere awkwardly in between.
The first time he tried using the bathtub by himself, he nearly flooded the room. The first time he tried lighting a gas lamp, he came dangerously close to setting the curtains on fire.
Of course, he could have asked one of the servants for help. That would have been the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, it would also have meant admitting to a household full of women that Prince Oskar of Prussia no longer knew how to operate his own bathroom or light a lamp without supervision.
The thought alone was unbearable.
So, rather than suffer that humiliation, he tied bedsheets together, climbed out of his third-floor window, and slipped down into the gardens whenever the palace grew quiet enough. Most nights, or at least whenever he thought he could get away with it, he made his way to the lake and washed there instead.
Which was how, nearly a year later, he had ended up standing there again knee-deep in the cool lake water, utterly bare, his uniform draped across a branch. The mild August air settled around him. His breath came slow and calm, but his mind raced.
He stared at the ripples and thought of the future. He knew what was coming: naval arms races. Entangling alliances. A bullet in Sarajevo. And the long, slow bleed of four empires into mud and madness.
In his world, Germany lost. The Kaiser fled. And in every movie afterward—especially after World War II—Germany was always the bad guy.
And now? He was technically on the bad guy's side.
Unless he did something.
He figured he had ten years. Ten years to get strong enough that people listened, make enough money that he could act, back the right projects, nudge the right alliances, maybe even stop the war altogether—or, at the very least, make sure Germany didn't lose it the same stupid way again.
He turned and climbed out of the lake, water running down his legs. He dressed slowly, methodically, lost in thought.
"Ten years," he muttered in clumsy but clear Imperial German. "Ten years before the world loses its mind."
Behind him, a figure might have seen only a tall young prince—back straight, expression unreadable, eyes hard with thought. A quiet royal son. A minor figure in a great empire.
They wouldn't know he was really an Asian truck driver, a failed kung-fu child star, a military nerd with PTSD, stuck in a stolen body, trying to hijack the twentieth century before it destroyed itself.
He breathed in, slow and deep.
"Oh man," he muttered. "What the hell am I gonna do?"
*****
Author's Note
Thank you for reading Chapter 1! I genuinely appreciate you giving the story a chance.
I'd love to hear your first impressions—what worked, what didn't, what made you laugh, or what you're hoping to see next. I read every comment, and feedback this early in the story is especially useful.
If you're enjoying it, adding the novel to your library or dropping a Power Stone also helps a lot.
One quick heads-up about the story itself: this is a slow-burn alternate history. Large-scale war is a long-term payoff rather than the immediate focus. The early story will follow Oskar as he tries to build influence, understand his new world, and somehow prepare Germany for a future only he knows is coming.
So if you're here to watch one extremely unqualified reincarnated prince try to derail the twentieth century—
Welcome aboard.
See you in Chapter 2.