In 1914, a whole generation would be fed into the world's first mass war.
Over seventy million men—more than twenty nations' worth of sons—would be called up, processed, uniformed, and stripped down to function. Names would become numbers. Lives would become entries in ledgers: units, shipments, replacement requests—moved by rail schedules and shouted orders like cargo.
And they would die faster than any century had managed before.
They would be cut down in trenches that ran like open wounds across Europe, and blown apart by artillery so constant the ground would forget what silence meant. They would drown at sea as steel giants tore each other open and sank in fire, dragging whole crews into black water. They would claw their way into the sky in new machines and discover that even the air could be made into a slaughterhouse. 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. An entire age would come home missing arms, missing faces, missing souls—if it came home at all.
And the old crowns would not survive.
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. 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 happened yet.
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.
Life, for many, was getting better.
Berlin pulsed with ambition, a modern capital rising fast. And just beyond it lay Potsdam—calmer, cleaner, wrapped in order and tradition. A city of officers and gardens and palaces. A place 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 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 the 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 winter gardens stretched out around him like a graveyard of frozen bones—bare branches clawing upward, hedgerows skeletal in the moonlight. The lake ahead was perfectly still, a sheet of black glass that held the stars more clearly than the sky itself.
He stood knee-deep in its waters.
Behind him, swaying 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.
Servants never stopped watching. Never stopped hovering. Every glance felt like judgment, even when it wasn't. Especially from the maids. They'd stop talking the second he entered a room. Or worse, they'd giggle—furtive, breathy giggles that made his stomach twist. He didn't know 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 made it worse.
Because he couldn't tell if they were mocking him—or attracted. Either one made his skin itch.
Especially Tanya.
She was his personal maid. Young, sharp-eyed, terrifyingly competent. 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 or dress or breathe without guidance.
He appreciated her. He respected her.
He also hated that she made him feel small.
He hated the way she appeared in doorways uninvited. The way she folded his clothes like he couldn't handle buttons. The way she looked at him with actual concern in her eyes.
He didn't need her concern.
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, he ran.
And now, once more, he stood alone in the lake, steam curling off his bare shoulders into the frozen air, breath slow and deliberate, trying to steady himself through sheer will and cold oxygen.
The cold bit at him.
He didn't flinch.
He was used to this now—stripping down, washing in silence, hanging his clothes from a tree branch like some vagabond prince. Not because it was dignified. Not because it made any sense. But because it was the one thing that still made him feel like he belonged to himself.
No maids. No questions. No pity.
Just cold water, moonlight, and the quiet, gnawing knowledge that the man reflected in the lake didn't really belong to him at all.
The lake reflected him perfectly: a monstrous, glorious freak of a man.
He hadn't always looked like this.
When he'd first woken up in this world—gasping, panicked, strapped into this stranger's body—he'd been unimpressive. Thin. Pale. Vaguely aristocratic in the limp, pasty way that came from too much indoor air and too little protein. Pretty cheekbones, soft hands. Lungs that wheezed like an asthmatic cat.
But then came the pushups. The runs. The squats. The desperate prison-cell workouts in his royal chamber. Every morning and night, like ritual, like obsession. He wasn't training to look good. He was training to survive.
And the body had responded. Too well. Too fast. As if it had been engineered for this. As if some divine gym bro had spiked his bloodstream with liquid steroids and then told his muscles, "Grow, coward."
Now, one year later, he looked like the bastard child of a Roman demigod and a Mr. Olympia finalist. Sculpted. Massive. Ridiculous.
He was tall—basketball-player tall. But not lean.
No.
He was dense.
His shoulders were wide enough to intimidate doorways. His chest looked like it had been carved with a hammer. His arms were absurd—veins like cables, biceps like coiled beasts. His legs? Titanic. Planted in the icy water like ancient pillars. He hadn't shivered once.
Every inch of him was built by obsession, fueled by rage, shame, and the refusal to be weak again.
And between his legs…
There hung 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 froze. Stared. Whispered:
"Jesus Christ."
Then quieter:
"Banana Blaster... what the fuck."
It wasn't just long.
It was absurd.
A biological liability. An architectural design flaw.
Sitting to pee had become a tactical nightmare. Wearing trousers that didn't turn him into a walking Rorschach test was basically impossible. 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 cold like traumatized hamsters hiding from God.
He sighed.
Goddamn it was cold.
Still, he flexed—once. For himself.
Just to see.
The biceps obeyed. Coiled. Twitched. The moonlight caught the lines of his body and turned them into silver armor. His skin steamed. His breath ghosted. His body looked like something grown in a laboratory specifically for dominance.
Short blond hair clung to his forehead. Icy blue eyes stared back—sharp, cold, almost cruel. His jaw could slice marble. His neck? A war crime.
He looked like a poster for a 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.
A 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 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 studied who Prince Oskar actually was.
He'd known about the Hohenzollerns. The empire. The world wars. But the fifth son of the Kaiser? A historical footnote. Barely a shadow in the textbooks. He'd meant to look him up once, but never got around to it.
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, weeping doctor—Prince Oskar had flatlined. He'd been dead.
So 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 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—thick as winter—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 prince. 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. Not warmth. Not 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. Not to entertain anyone.
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. He didn't flip. 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.
They did.
They saw a golden goose.
They uploaded 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. A turtle costume. Called him talented, adorable, brilliant. They 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.
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 transformed. Less "funny kid," more armchair analyst.
His Eastern fans called him Teacher War-Spear. Westerners just said, "that Asian dude who never shuts up about logistics."
He had a gift: memory. Read it once, keep the important parts forever.
By the time he applied to university, he wasn't chasing grades. He was collecting tools. He chose engineering because generals should understand steel and machines. Not for the degree. For the diagrams.
He watched wars between lectures:
– Ethiopia – Myanmar – Border skirmishes no one else tracked
But one war rose above the noise: the war in the West.
Tanks. Drones. Missiles. Satellites. National armies. Industrial-scale slaughter.
He analyzed it obsessively. Drew arrows. Broke down offensives. Mocked mistakes.
Then came the comment:
"You talk big, laoshi. But what do you actually know about war?"
And another:
"You haven't even had a real job."
Thousands of likes.
It stung.
Because it was true.
He'd grown up surrounded by automation.
The most dangerous thing he'd ever dodged was a pissed-off girl at school.
He wanted more.
He wanted to be someone real.
In his head, he heard names:
Yue Fei. Han Xin. Napoleon.
None of them started at the top. They climbed.
So he made a plan.
He got his truck driver's license while still in university.
Not to kill. Not to fight. Just to see.
He joined a foreign volunteer unit as a logistics driver—the very bottom.
And he saw it all.
Endless convoys. Hidden depots. Artillery lines.
Hospitals built in ruined malls.
He lost three trucks.
One to spikes. One to a quadcopter. One to a swarm of drones.
Each time, he lived. Barely.
Others started joking: "You're cursed. The trucks die for you."
They called him the Drone Magnet.
He did more than drive. He volunteered for rescue runs.
Everyone knew the trench could be safer than the road.
He learned to: – slap on tourniquets, – haul screaming bodies, – drive soaked in blood.
He saw detached limbs. Melted faces. He learned what high explosive meant.
He filmed the aftermath. Not gore—just the broken men. The stories.
He asked: "What does war feel like?" "When were you most afraid?"
Command didn't like it. Tried to stop it.
Then let it happen.
His channel exploded.
Now he wasn't "War-Spear the Analyst." He was the Asian guy in the war.
And for a time, it felt meaningful.
But he wanted out.
He told his parents he was done.
They said no.
"Just a bit longer. The channel is booming. Your little siblings need this."
So he stayed.
The last thing he remembered was one final, "safe" stream:
Dashcam on. Forest road.
"I'm in the rear. Logistics cockroach, my mans. Nothing can touch me."
Then came the flash.
His final moment—white-hot and sudden.
There was no pain. No sound. No thought.
Just nothing.
One frame he was alive. The next, he was gone.
And then—
He woke up in a palace bed. In someone else's body. Under painted ceilings and silk sheets.
The world was no longer his.
He came to gasping, lungs burning like he'd drowned in dry air. The sheets beneath him were soft. The air smelled of starch, candlewax, and medicine. The clothes clinging to his skin were too fine—stitched like they were meant for someone who mattered.
He opened his eyes to a fresco above: mythological Germans killing mythological Romans in glorious, gilded agony.
He blinked.
Later, he'd piece together what happened.
Prince Oskar had fallen down a staircase. Prince Oskar had slipped into a coma. Doctors had whispered there was little hope. The family prayed.
And then, during the night, Oskar's heart stopped.
He died.
For a few quiet hours, the palace mourned. The nurses stepped back. The candles burned low. Only one maid stayed by the bed—Tanya. Young, sharp, dutiful. She wasn't a friend, just his assigned personal attendant. But she cried.
Then, at midnight, the dead prince suddenly gasped, thrashed, and opened his eyes.
His body arched. Fingers clawed at silk sheets. Air tore back into lungs that had already gone cold.
And his eyes opened.
But it wasn't Oskar anymore.
Not inside.
It was Zhang Ge.
Even now, when he thought about it, there was a flicker of guilt—thin and distant. Someone else had died. He had simply… taken the vacancy.
It wasn't like he'd applied for the position.
He had woken in a stranger's deathbed. No explanation. No instructions. No way back.
Tanya was the first thing he saw.
She had been weeping beside him, and when he breathed again she cried out his name and threw herself forward, arms wrapping around him, her German spilling out in frantic, breathless bursts.
It might as well have been artillery.
He sat there stiffly, stunned, patting her golden hair as if that were the correct response. His eyes moved past her shoulder—taking in the room, the carved furniture, the gaslight flickering against painted walls.
This was not a hospital or a barracks.
This was a palace.
He swallowed.
He had to say something.
Had to sound like a prince of the German Empire, not a confused truck driver who had just respawned in the wrong century.
"Y-yes… my man," he said in broken, awkward German, nodding gravely as if issuing a royal command.
Tanya froze.
And just like that, the legend had began.
Prince Oskar had survived. Prince Oskar was... off.
His German came from war movies and meme apps. He could say things like "Hands hoch!" and "Scheiße!" but not "please pass the butter" or "I don't know who the hell I am."
He couldn't hold courtly conversation. Not in 1903 German, anyway. His accent was warped—half Beijing, half YouTube. Under stress, he slipped into Mandarin. Or worse, modern English. Sometimes both. It wasn't code-switching. It was system failure.
Yes, he'd studied history. But not this history. Not the man behind the name. He had no idea what kind of person the old Oskar had been. Which servants he'd favored. What jokes he'd told. Whether he was cruel, kind, shy, flirtatious. Whether he liked pickles or horses.
He was trying to play a role without a script.
He failed. Constantly.
He called a general "my man." He told palace guards "Guten Tag" at midnight. He promised a maid "I'll be back," and never returned.
Whispers bloomed like mold in marble halls:
"The fall changed him." "His soul is bent." "Maybe it's not even him anymore."
Some called it a miracle. Others weren't so sure.
And of course, he couldn't exactly ask for German lessons. That was too humiliating—and he didn't know how to ask that in German anyway.
So he adapted.
He built a mask.
Short sentences. Blank face. Eyes like a hawk, but slightly brain-damaged.
"Yes." "No." "As you say." "Give me cookies now."
He kept his back straight. Nodded slowly. Avoided eye contact unless necessary.
He became the cold, silent, possibly brain-dead prince who stared too much, spoke too little, and did terrifying amounts of calisthenics at dawn.
It worked.
The nobility learned to ignore him. The servants thought he was possessed. His father, grudgingly, accepted that this version of Oskar was at least quieter than the last one.
But alone, the mask cracked.
That's when the fear crept in.
He'd grown up in a voice-controlled apartment. Showers that obeyed commands. Lights that dimmed themselves. Groceries that arrived by drone.
Now he was trapped in a world where even flushing a toilet was a mechanical puzzle. The first time he tried to use the bathtub, he nearly flooded half the floor. The first time he tried to light a lamp, he nearly set fire to the drapes.
He gave up.
He stopped trying.
He lit a single candle beside his bed and left it at that.
As for bathing… he tied bedsheets into a rope, climbed out the window, and washed himself in the lake like some feral demigod.
And so it was that one year later after awakening, he stood knee-deep in freezing water, bare-chested, his uniform draped across a branch. His muscles steamed in the cold. 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, muscles twitching in the cold. 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 20th 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.
If something stood out to you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. First impressions matter a lot at this stage, and your feedback really helps me refine the pacing and direction moving forward. I read every comment.
If you'd like to support the novel early on, adding it to your library or dropping a power stone makes a bigger difference than you might think.
And one quick heads-up: if you're here purely for large-scale war, that arc is a long-term build. This is a slow-burn story, and the major war elements won't arrive until much later (well past Chapter 100).
See you in the next chapter.