Long ago, soldiers told a story about a man who called himself a prophet. They even wrote books about the man.
In one of these stories, he and his companions had come down from a successful raid tired and half-drunk on victory. Their hands still smelled of smoke. Their pockets were heavy. Slaves had been taken. Loot had been counted. The day had been good, in the way that days are "good" when men stop measuring goodness by mercy.
They made camp. They laughed. They sat around a fire and began to eat like men who believed the world belonged to them.
That was when a woman came out of the dark.
Jewish, beautiful, quiet—quiet in a way that did not belong among conquerors. She offered to serve them a whole lamb, fresh, rich, cooked by her own hands. She bowed, asked their leader politely which part he would eat first, and smiled as if this were hospitality instead of something far more sinister.
The men grinned. They expected fear. They expected begging. They expected obedience.
They did not expect to be deceived by the woman.
And so she served him first.
What he did not know—what none of them knew—was that his men had slaughtered her family earlier that same day. The lamb was not a gift. It was a knife dressed up as food.
The prophet ate.
He was a man accustomed to being followed. Accustomed to assuming that the world would not dare poison his mouth.
Then he paused.
Something was wrong.
Not rot. Not bitterness. Something sharper. Something that made the body recoil before the mind could find the words.
He did not swallow.
He spat it out into the dirt and said—calm, almost amused—that the lamb's feet had told him it was poisoned.
The men froze mid-chew.
For one heartbeat they believed him—because belief is easier than admitting you were careless.
But it was too late.
One of his companions—one who had trusted him enough to eat because he ate—collapsed onto the ground.
His eyes rolled. His hands clawed at his throat. His face changed color in the firelight.
When they asked him why he had swallowed even though it tasted wrong, the dying man answered with the simplest truth in the world:
"I ate because I saw him eat."
Then he died.
The woman was torn apart afterwards, killed not by the prophet but by the furious relatives of the dead man—rage needing a body to punish, because rage always needs something it can touch.
And the prophet lived.
He walked away.
He told people he had been protected.
But poison does not need you to swallow all of it.
It only needs enough.
A year later the prophet began to scream in pain as if something inside him was chewing through his organs. He grew thin. Weak. Fevered. He prayed. He begged healers. He tried everything men try when they realize too late that the body cannot be commanded the way armies can.
In the end, he died anyway.
They left his corpse in the open for three days, waiting for him to rise again.
He did not.
And the lesson of the story was not "be kind."
The lesson was colder:
When you build your power on fear and blood, you should never expect all to merely smile and be loyal towards you.
---
The Ottomans had made the same mistake.
Not with poison.
With assumption.
For centuries they had pushed into Europe by force—demanding obedience where it was not freely given, pressing rule onto peoples who did not ask for it, collecting taxes and sons and prayers from lands that had never invited them. They had worn authority like armor and treated resistance as something to grind down.
Then time changed.
The empire weakened.
The world turned cold around it.
And suddenly, the Ottomans reached out toward the very powers they had once threatened—speaking of stability, partnership, mediation, restraint. They asked for understanding. They asked to be treated like a pillar of Europe instead of a problem to be solved.
And when the moment came—when they most needed loyalty—they found only silence.
No coalition to save them.
No great friend rushing in.
Only polite distance.
Only the slow turning away.
Oskar had made sure of it.
In his old life—when he was still Zhang Ge—he would not have cared whether the Ottomans swallowed Europe whole. Empires rose, empires fell. It was history. It was noise on a screen.
But here, in this life, he was not watching as an outsider.
He was the Crown Prince of Germany.
A ruler of Christian peoples.
A husband.
A father.
And when you have children sleeping under your roof, you stop treating "foreign conquest" as an abstract argument. You start imagining what conquest means when it reaches your cities, your churches, your people.
Oskar did not want war.
He had spent years trying to build Germany strong enough that war would become irrational—too expensive, too hopeless, too frightening for anyone to start.
But strength did not erase reality.
Some conflicts, in his mind, were not optional.
Some were… surgery.
Necessary evil, performed now so that the patient did not die later.
So he had not stopped Italy from moving on Libya.
He had not reached out to rescue the Ottoman Empire from the consequences of its own long history.
He had let the Balkans heat like iron—because he knew what the Balkans were: a region where old debts never stayed buried, where wounds still bled under the skin of maps.
He sat now in Potsdam, newspapers and reports spread across his desk like battlefield bandages—Tripoli, al-Shatt, reprisals, raids, desert skirmishes, the slow poisoning of occupation. He read without pleasure. Without pride.
Only with calculation.
Because he was not fool enough to believe the world would treat Germany kindly out of gratitude.
And he was not naïve enough to think enemies would ever become friends just because you were nice, or more powerful than everyone else.
That was how you ate poisoned lamb.
That was how you died with your mouth full of trust.
No—Oskar would not make that mistake.
He did not build his future on the goodwill of rivals.
He did not imagine Britain would suddenly become gentle.
He did not imagine France would stop resenting the Rhine.
He did not imagine Russia would forget its hunger.
He knew who was surrounded.
He knew who would smile while sharpening knives.
So he trusted only what could be trusted:
Austria-Hungary—because it was bound by fear and geography as much as treaty. And there he had a true friend and ally now, Archduke Franz Ferdinand who would have his back.
But more than anything he trusted his own people—because they were the only foundation that could not be negotiated away.
And his family—because it was the only thing he would kill for without hesitation.
Everything else?
Everything else could turn into poison.
And Oskar had learned, by now, to taste poison early.
And as Oskar sat there in Potsdam—papers spread across the desk like dirty bandages—another bundle of reports lay at the top of the stack.
Not Libya this time.
The Balkans.
Telegrams and newspapers spoke the same language: panic under polite words. Ottoman units pushed back already. Border towns changing hands. Old grudges turning into gunfire. Balkan armies moving like men who had been waiting for this moment their whole lives.
Oskar read it, and felt… nothing.
Not pity.
Not sorrow.
Not sympathy.
Only a quiet, cold interest—like a man watching a storm finally arrive at a coastline he had studied for years.
He did not mourn Ottoman setbacks.
If anything, a darker curiosity rose in him: Would any of them dare?
Would Bulgaria, or Greece, or Serbia, or some coalition of Christian states ever reach for the great prize—the one city every Balkan schoolboy dreamed about and every Ottoman officer would die to protect?
Constantinople.
Oskar doubted it. Even sick empires defended their hearts. Even dying beasts bit hardest when cornered. If the Balkans ever truly threatened the city, the Ottomans would throw everything into the defense—guns, men, fire, hunger, desperation. Constantinople would not fall easily.
But still… Oskar waited to see.
Because when he thought of Constantinople, he did not think first of modern politics.
He thought of history.
He thought of the old Christian city before it became a trophy. He pictured it the way he'd seen it in books and ruins and paintings: the skyline of domes, the gold and stone, the great churches that once held prayers older than entire kingdoms. The libraries, the mosaics, the carved columns carried from older civilizations like Assyria and Rome and Greece and Persia—layer upon layer of human memory stacked into one place.
And he thought of what was lost.
Not just the lives—though those mattered too.
But the manuscripts burned or scattered. The art smashed or plastered over. The archives looted. The symbols stripped away not because they were dangerous, but because they were different.
A city taken by assault was, under the customs of the age, legally open to plunder. Everyone knew that. Everyone excused it.
And Oskar, sitting here as a prince, could admit what he would never say aloud at court:
That the most unforgivable part was not even conquest itself.
It was the erasing.
Oskar didn't hate the Ottoman people. He didn't hate any of it really.
He was still, at heart, Zhang Ge—a history addict who could spend an entire night reading about ancient empires the way other men read romances.
And to him, history was sacred—not because it was always beautiful, but because it was true.
Good history. Bad history. Cruel history. Shameful history.
It still belonged to humanity.
It was not something you were supposed to smash simply because it insulted your narrative.
History was a warning system.
A memory.
A scar that taught the next generation where the knife had been.
So when he looked at the Ottomans—at their long habit of conquering and converting and burying what came before—he felt not hatred, but a deep, unwavering contempt.
Not for their blood.
For their indifference to what they destroyed.
And perhaps that was why, as the Balkans ignited and the Ottoman armies began to retreat under pressure, Oskar did not feel sorry at all.
If a Christian power—any Christian power—ever reached Constantinople again and tore the city out of Ottoman hands…
If the churches could breathe again.
If the libraries could be rebuilt.
If the old mosaics could be uncovered and remembered instead of hidden…
Then in Oskar's mind, it would not be conquest.
It would be restoration.
A return of something stolen from history itself.
He knew it was not that simple.
But still…
Oskar had never fully lost the part of himself that dreamed. For all his steel and schedules and contingency plans, he remained an idealist at heart—someone who could not help imagining what might be, if enough things went right.
So he set the newspapers aside and let out a slow breath.
Rising from his desk, he crossed to the window and looked out over the palace grounds. Below, laughter cut through the cold air. His children—some barely toddling, others already seven years old—were tumbling through the snow in clumsy boots and oversized coats, throwing snowballs with terrible aim and shrieking with joy when they missed.
The sight softened something in him.
He hoped—quietly, fiercely—that the world they would grow up in would be kinder than the one now tearing itself apart. A world where the headlines they read as adults would be filled with trivial scandals, foolish romances, and pointless arguments about sport—anything but casualty lists and maps covered in arrows.
A foolish hope, perhaps.
But hope, he believed, was still better than resignation.
---
That afternoon, the calm shattered into ceremony.
In the Imperial Palace at Potsdam, in the study of Wilhelm II, a royal council assembled—generals, ministers, admirals, all drawn by the same word whispered through the corridors:
Oil.
The mood was unmistakably lighter than usual.
"Your Highness, congratulations," Count Tirpitz, State Secretary of the Navy, said as he took his seat, unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice. "I've received reports confirming that the oil fields in Cyrenaica—those under your Oskar Industrial Group's management—are… extraordinary."
He allowed himself a rare grin.
"With the rapid expansion of the fleet, nearly all of our newest warships now run on oil-fired boilers. Consumption has increased dramatically. While the Navy has built substantial reserves, even millions of tons may prove insufficient under blockade conditions. And frankly—our budget cannot support much more."
He spread his hands.
"This discovery changes everything."
Oskar inclined his head, measured and calm.
"Marshal," he replied, "I admit I did not expect the reserves to be quite this large. But the decision has been made. German Energy is accelerating extraction immediately. I have already ordered preparations to begin shipping crude north within three months."
A low murmur passed through the room.
"Increasing domestic stockpiles," Oskar continued, "reduces our exposure to foreign supply chains. It also lowers long-term costs. Oil extracted under our own control is far cheaper than oil bought under someone else's permission."
Several ministers exchanged glances, visibly pleased.
This was not merely profit.
This was security.
"This can only be God's blessing upon the German Empire," Moltke the Younger declared, voice rich with conviction. "With fuel secured, the machines of modern war—aircraft, trucks, motorcycles, armored units—will not falter. In the next great war, Britain and France will not be able to outlast us."
A few heads nodded.
A few murmured agreement.
Oskar said nothing.
Inside, his thoughts were far less charitable.
God's blessing? he thought dryly.
If that were true, history would have found this oil decades ago.
This was not divine favor.
It was foresight.
But Moltke knew exactly what he was doing—wrapping the discovery in providence, praising the Empire while quietly diverting credit away from Oskar himself. Flattery for the Kaiser. Distance from the Crown Prince.
Two birds.
One sermon.
Around the table, however, the men leaned toward Moltke's explanation. Few could imagine how Oskar might have known where to drill unless some higher power whispered it to him. The idea that a teenage prince simply understood the future was more unsettling than theology.
Wilhelm II nodded, clearly pleased.
"God's blessing indeed," the Kaiser said warmly. "My boy, you continue to astonish me. Truly—what would Germany do without you?"
He paused, his expression hardening.
"And those Italians," he added with a scoff. "They have misjudged this affair terribly. Perhaps this is God's punishment for their arrogance."
Oskar held his expression neutral.
"Your Majesty," Bernhard von Bülow added smoothly, "Rome must be regretting its decision deeply. Forty percent of the revenue is generous, but imagine—had they known the truth, they could have claimed everything."
He chuckled softly.
"Instead, Germany will emerge as a central power in the future oil market. The financial implications alone are staggering."
Laughter rippled through the room—controlled, satisfied, the sound of men who believed fortune had chosen them.
Oskar let it pass.
Then he spoke.
"Gentlemen," he said evenly, "I appreciate the enthusiasm. But let us not confuse opportunity with safety."
The mood shifted at once.
"The oil fields," Oskar continued, "are far from our homeland. We cannot defend them directly. If war breaks out, the British and French will not hesitate to strike—either by naval action, by landing troops, or by encouraging the Italians to seize the fields for themselves."
He paused, letting the words settle.
"Even worse," he added, "the Italians may decide—quite rationally—that forty percent is no longer enough."
The smiles vanished.
Everyone in the room understood the danger immediately. Libya was not Prussia. It was not Bavaria. It was not even Alsace. It was exposed—reachable by hostile fleets, dependent on goodwill that could evaporate overnight.
Silence stretched.
"At present," Count Tirpitz said slowly, "there is nothing we can do about that reality. If war begins, Britain will deploy its fleet to blockade our coastline immediately. Even if we possess oil, we may be unable to transport it home."
He straightened slightly.
"However," he continued, "if the Imperial Navy defeats the British fleet—if we break the blockade—then every other problem becomes… manageable."
Wilhelm II leaned back in his chair, fingers drumming lightly on the armrest.
"So it seems," the Kaiser said, "that the Navy's task has once again become more demanding."
His gaze locked onto Tirpitz.
"Marshal," Wilhelm II asked, voice calm but sharp beneath it, "does the Imperial Navy truly have the confidence to defeat the British fleet and face the French—and then, if necessary, reclaim our oil fields in Libya?"
The question hung in the air.
Britain alone was formidable.
Britain and France together had broken empires before.
Wilhelm II felt the unease settle into his chest like a cold weight. Spain. The Dutch Republic. Napoleonic France. History was littered with powers that had tried—and failed—to challenge British sea supremacy.
Was Germany next?
Tirpitz did not hesitate.
"Your Majesty," he said firmly, "the Imperial Navy has full confidence in its ability to meet both the British and French fleets. Our ships are modern. Our crews are trained. Our doctrine is sound."
Wilhelm II studied him for a long moment.
"Very well," the Kaiser said at last. "Then we continue as planned."
He rose slightly in his chair, voice gaining authority.
"The Empire must continue preparing—not only militarily, but technologically. If the day comes when we are forced to act, Germany will not be found wanting."
"Yes, Your Majesty," the council replied in unison.
The meeting moved on.
But the laughter did not return.
---
Across the Channel, in London, there was no laughter at all.
"Damn it!" Winston Churchill snapped, slamming a hand against the table. "How can the Germans be this lucky? We squeeze their oil supply, we manipulate prices, we restrict access—and suddenly they stumble onto one of the largest oil fields in Africa!"
His face was flushed with anger.
"All our work—wasted."
Prime Minister Asquith said nothing at first, his expression tight. British intelligence reports lay open before him, numbers and diagrams underlined in red.
Nearly all German warships now ran on oil.
The Royal Navy had counted on that dependence.
They had believed they could starve it.
"It appears," Asquith said finally, "that we must consider alternatives."
"We could act immediately," Navy Secretary McKenna suggested. "The Mediterranean Fleet could strike the oil facilities directly—destroy the ports, sabotage the wells, land troops if necessary."
"No," Sir Edward Grey cut in at once. "Absolutely not."
He turned toward McKenna, eyes hard.
"That would be a declaration of war—without justification. And do not forget that a substantial share of the oil profits belongs to Italy. Such an action would alienate them completely."
Grey folded his hands.
"We are attempting to draw Italy closer—not drive them away."
Churchill leaned back, thinking, then smiled thinly.
"Then we do it properly," he said. "We let the Italians take everything."
The room stilled.
"When war comes," Churchill continued, "we encourage Italy to seize the fields outright. The Germans get nothing. If Italy proves… uncooperative, then the wells can be destroyed later."
Asquith nodded slowly.
"Yes," he said. "That will suffice."
He closed the folder in front of him.
"For now, we allow the Germans their oil. Once war begins, the situation will resolve itself."
The ministers murmured assent.
Then Asquith straightened.
"Gentlemen," he said, voice firm, "the international situation is deteriorating rapidly. Germany is preparing for war—this much is clear. That means our time is limited."
He looked around the table.
"From this moment forward, all efforts must be directed toward preparation. We must be ready to defeat Germany when the moment arrives."
He paused.
"And we must strengthen every pressure point available to us."
His gaze lingered.
"France will continue extending loans to Serbia. If necessary, Britain will support those loans indirectly. A stronger Serbia weakens Austria-Hungary—and a weakened Austria weakens Germany."
No one objected.
"If a Balkan war gives us leverage," Asquith continued, "we will use it. If it gives us opportunity, we will not hesitate."
He stood.
"The British Empire must remain the leading power in the world."
A brief silence followed.
Then, solemnly:
"God bless the British Empire."
Outside, London moved as usual.
Inside its councils, the future was being sharpened into a weapon.
And far away, in Potsdam, a German Crown Prince stared at maps and knew—without doubt—that the age of hesitation was coming to an end.