Potsdam was peaceful in the way only pre-catastrophe Europe could be peaceful.
A light mist drifted across the Havel River, blurring the red roofs and church spires, and the polished windows of the Neues Palais caught the sunrise like someone was polishing the century itself.
A young man sat alone by the stone embankment, posture too rigid, eyes too sharp, as if he were waiting for the river to reveal secrets.
In this life, he was Oskar Prinz von Preußen, the fifth son of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In his previous life, he had been Zhan Ge (战戈) — "War-Spear."
A name his grandfather gave him as a joke, which the internet embraced as destiny.
To millions online, he had been a strange genius:
half military historian, half gaming streamer, half unmedicated curiosity gremlin.
He lived in a luxury apartment in Shanghai, rarely left his room, and spent his teenage years learning everything about war except the part where you actually get shot.
He wasn't political.
He wasn't ideological.
He wasn't brave.
He was curious. Pathologically curious.
And that, inevitably, became fatal.
When the war in Ukraine erupted, Zhan Ge devoured every piece of information he could find — footage, documents, news, satellite images.
But the more he studied, the more frustrated he became.
Both sides were lying.
Propaganda, misinformation, exaggerated victory reports, disappearing casualty numbers…
None of the data felt real.
Not reliable.
Not precise.
Not satisfying.
He wanted to know what real modern war looked like.
How armies actually moved.
How logistics actually functioned.
How supply lines survived under missiles, drones, and artillery.
He wanted to know how real soldiers slept, ate, marched, panicked, reorganized, and survived.
And he wanted to know it firsthand, because secondhand knowledge wasn't enough for him.
So, one night — after a ten-hour livestream rant about how "nobody understands operational art" — he made the most Zhan-Ge decision imaginable:
"Fuck it. I'm going to Ukraine."
Not as a sniper.
Not as infantry.
Not as anything heroic.
No.
He applied to Russia's foreign volunteer formations as a truck driver.
A literal logistics driver.
Someone who would haul shells, food, fuel, wounded men, and replacement parts from rear depots to frontline positions.
His reasoning?
"If you want to understand the anatomy of war, you study the arteries. Logistics is the blood flow of conflict. I want to learn real modern warfare, not the YouTube version."
He wasn't there to fight.
He was there to learn.
Russia accepted him with minimal questions.
China and Russia weren't enemies, he knew some Russian phrases, and the military always needed more drivers than it needed philosophers.
So he got his wish.
He saw Russia.
He saw front lines.
He saw trench networks, drone towers, blown-out factories, supply hubs, frozen fields cratered like the Moon.
He studied everything.
He took notes.
He asked too many questions.
Soldiers called him "the Chinese Professor."
And then, one day, when he was driving ammunition along a forest road, the world ended mid-sentence.
A blur. A roar.
A pressure wave like a giant hand crushing his lungs.
He didn't know if it was a missile or a loitering drone or a precision artillery strike.
He only knew that one moment he was driving and the next there was nothing.
No time to think.
No time to fear.
Just a flash — a burning, black-edged shape like the outline of an Iron Cross he once bought online — and then oblivion.
The next thing he remembered was cold air, silk sheets, and a ceiling decorated with mythological Germans stabbing mythological Romans.
He had woken up as a 16-year-old prince in 1903.
Oskar.
Prince Oskar.
German royalty.
Hohenzollern blood.
A century before he was born.
In a world gearing up for a catastrophe he knew was coming.
The body was healthy. Strong. Handsome.
German aristocrat genetics were not messing around.
But it felt wrong.
Like wearing someone else's skin.
Like he was a tourist trapped in a historical reenactment with no exit.
His German was good — by modern standards.
But speaking German to historical Germans, using 1900s vocabulary, formal court manners, aristocratic etiquette?
Impossible.
One slip, one modern slang word, one mispronounced title — and he'd be exposed as a lunatic.
So he came up with a strategy.
A stupid strategy.
But it worked.
He became the silent, cold, hard-ass prince.
He only gave short replies:
"Yes."
"No."
"Quite."
"As you say."
He practiced his face in the mirror until he could maintain the perfect Prussian death-glare that communicated:
Do not talk to me. I am aristocracy. I am dangerous. I hate everything.
And people believed it.
After all, he was the Kaiser's fifth son — not important enough for political expectations, not irrelevant enough to be mocked.
Just… odd.
Very odd.
Servants whispered:
"Prince Oskar has become strange."
"He stares too much."
"He speaks so little."
"He lifts logs in the garden like a lumberjack."
"He trained with calisthenics two hours before breakfast today."
"He is… not normal."
Even the Kaiser once sighed loudly at dinner:
"My son, I do not know what demon has seized your personality,
but at least it has made you disciplined."
Now, at seventeen, he sat by the Havel River, wearing a perfectly tailored Prussian uniform, posture stiff, expression unreadable.
He appeared calm.
But inside, the same frantic war-obsessed brain was spinning like a centrifuge.
He knew the timeline.
He knew the mistakes Germany would make.
He knew how the First World War would break empires like toys in a furnace.
And he had less than ten years to change fate.
To stop the naval arms race.
To improve German logistics.
To reorganize alliances.
To avert disaster — or win the war before it became unwinnable.
But how could he influence anything when he was:
– a reincarnated truck driver
– pretending to be a stoic aristocrat
– in a teenage body
– with zero political capital
– and a reputation for being "weird and possibly cursed"?
He flicked a pebble into the river.
"Ten years," he whispered, in carefully old-fashioned German.
"Ten years before the world loses its mind."
He stood, straightened his uniform, and walked back toward the palace.
Everyone who saw him stepped aside respectfully.
To them he looked like a cold, disciplined young noble.
In truth, he was a confused logistics volunteer with PTSD, reincarnated into the most fragile timeline in European history.
And beneath his calm mask, one thought burned:
This time, I will shoot first.
Not bullets.
Not shells.
But decisions.
The decisions that would rewrite a century.