Men are haunted by the vastness of time.
So we ask ourselves: will our actions still echo when we're gone?
Will strangers centuries from now speak our names and wonder who we were,
how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?
Thinking of it all now, Oskar sighed as he sat at the palace garden's riverside.
At this time of night, Potsdam was peaceful in the way only pre‑catastrophe Europe could be peaceful.
Mist drifted low over the lake before him, softening red roofs and church spires beyond the garden trees and walls. To his side, the windows of the Neues Palais caught the winter sun and threw it back like someone polishing the century itself. From the window to his room, a rope of knotted bedsheets hung lazily.
He was what, sixteen now? A young man by any standard, sitting alone on the stone embankment, boots planted, posture stiff. His hair was still damp from swimming in the lake earlier. Now he just stared at the water as if it might answer questions.
In this life, he was Oskar Prinz von Preußen, fifth son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This body had been born on 27 July 1888, although he—the person now driving it—had only been here for about a year.
In his previous life, he had been Zhang Ge (战戈) — "War‑Spear."
A name his grandfather gave him as a joke. The internet turned it into a prophecy.
That quote about echoes and eternity came from some pirated Hollywood movie he'd watched in a cramped Shanghai living room as a little dumpling barely old enough to speak but smart enough to remember it even now. Later, as a teenager, when he rewatched it, he'd mocked it.
Too much bronze, not enough logistics.
Now, in 1904, stuck in a formerly dead prince's body, it wouldn't leave his head.
Will my actions echo at all?
Or am I just a bug in the timeline?
He pulled his muscular legs in and hugged them tighter, letting his mind slide backwards in time. More than anything, why the hell he was here bothered him like nothing else.
When he thought back to his childhood in China, it always started with a camera.
Not with a dream of fame. Not with the internet. With a cheap camcorder and a little boy trying very hard to be cool—like a powerful Shaolin monk doing one‑finger push‑ups and kicking ass.
His parents—or rather, foster parents, after his real father died—had taken him to a Shaolin temple once, on a rare family trip. He'd watched the monks move like steel wrapped in flesh: kicks sharp, stances rooted, bodies carved by work.
On the way home, he'd stared at his own thin arms and thought:
I want to be like that.
Back in their old, peeling apartment, he stole his father's camcorder.
He wasn't trying to be funny. He was trying to record his progress, to see if he looked like the masters he had seen.
The answer, in the recordings, was: no.
He didn't break blocks or do one‑finger push‑ups or smash wood with his head. He just flailed. He fell off a chair gloriously while trying to do a backflip. His "Shaolin" stances shook and looked like a drunken little man dancing. His "flying kicks" were small hops and big crashes. Still, he grunted and shouted and took it very seriously.
His foster parents watched the footage and, for the first time ever, laughed instead of getting mad.
He didn't understand what was so funny.
They did.
They muttered about having found a golden goose that laid golden eggs.
They started uploading little clips to Chinese platforms "not just to share, but to make money." When some overseas repost with English subtitles went mildly viral, they understood something else:
People would pay for this.
They saw comments in English they couldn't read, only recognise:
"LOL," "funny," "cute."
Dollar signs appeared in their eyes.
So they pushed him to do more.
"Do more kung fu, Gege."
"Say something in English."
"Don't worry about homework, this is your future. School is useless and you're no good at it anyway."
They bought a better camera, even a small turtle costume the moment the first money came in. They laughed, told him how cute he was, how talented he was, how he'd "bring glory to the family." They signed him up for online English classes.
They weren't evil, he always hoped. They were just young Chinese parents who suddenly saw a ladder out of poverty and decided to climb it using their adopted kid's back.
By the time he was a teenager, their life had changed.
The old district apartment was gone.
Now they lived in a shiny place with voice commands and touchscreens.
"Lights on."
"Shower on."
"Shower off."
No valves, no levers, nothing that needed too much touching. Futuristic conveniences.
He barely needed to touch anything physical or go to a store. He lived in front of screens:
streaming, editing, sleeping, eating, repeating.
At first his parents helped, but once he learned the tools, they made him do it all.
But his body changed faster than the algorithm.
Cute kid doing kung fu badly? Internet gold.
Awkward scrawny teen with glasses doing kung fu badly? Internet cringe.
Chinese comments. Foreign comments. All the same:
"Stop pretending."
"Your English is garbage."
"You're not a monk, you're a clown."
"Fucking loser."
People didn't laugh in good faith anymore; they laughed to mock him. And most of all, ever since his parents had made him attempt a "Kung Fu trick" off a horse—he fell, the video went viral, and he went to the hospital—his body had never felt quite the same.
So he pivoted.
No more wannabe Shaolin.
No more spinning kicks into furniture.
No more dangerous stunts that actually got him hurt.
His parents, after some complaining, agreed. Money mattered more than nostalgia.
He started streaming games.
At first he was just another Chinese kid shouting over shooters. Then he rage‑quit and went viral, but soon he discovered strategy games—the kind with maps and units and supply lines and, most of all, nation‑building—and something inside him woke up.
He redrew borders on screen, built the pyramids in China, moved armies of millions with a mouse, fantasised about rewriting history. He found he cared less about "headshots" and more about "how do I make this country economically unkillable?"
His old obsession with war—the movies, the documentaries, the dusty military histories he'd hoarded—came roaring back.
He became:
– half gamer,
– half military nerd,
– half unmedicated curiosity gremlin.
His Chinese audience called him 战戈老师, Teacher War‑Spear.
Foreigners called him "Professor War‑Spear" and "that Chinese dude who never shuts up about logistics."
He'd never focused on school much, but once he actually tried, he realised he was good at it. He had a gift most people didn't: memory.
He remembered things better than most. He could read a book once and keep the important parts without revisiting it. So when something interested him—history, engineering, war—he absorbed it fast.
By the time he applied to university—more because money wasn't an issue than because he wanted to go—his content had shifted again.
Less "funny kid," more "armchair analyst."
He chose engineering because, in his mind, all serious military people understood steel and engines. He didn't care much about the diploma; he cared about being able to look at a ship diagram or a bridge and know if it made sense.
Between lectures he watched war.
He followed conflicts everywhere:
ancient documentaries,
wars in Ethiopia,
Myanmar's messy civil war with DIY drones and jungle ambushes—even elephants carrying supplies across rivers,
random border skirmishes no one else cared about.
But one war towered above everything else.
Ukraine.
It was modern.
It was big.
It put real national armies with real tech and large numbers on opposite sides.
Tanks, drones, missiles, EW, satellites—all in the same sandbox.
So he watched. And analysed. And drew arrows on maps, made videos, wrote long breakdowns of offensives and failures.
He critiqued Russian generals.
He mocked Ukrainian mistakes.
He explained how he would do it better.
It was fun. It was addictive. It felt important.
Then, under one video, a comment climbed to the top:
"You talk big, laoshi, but what does a boy like you truly know of war and death?"
Another:
"All this analysis is just guessing and speculation. You don't know anything about war. You haven't even worked a real job in your life."
He tried to ignore it, but it was true he didn't actually know anything for sure. He hadn't ever worked a normal job. And thousands of likes under those comments burned.
It stung because it was true.
He'd grown up in a voice‑controlled apartment.
The most dangerous thing he'd dodged was a pissed‑off girl at school who didn't appreciate his flirting.
He wanted to be more than "internet guy."
He wanted to be remembered for doing something truly meaningful and good.
In his head, that movie quote mixed with names from Chinese history:
Yue Fei.
Han Xin.
Qi Jiguang.
Napoleon too, from foreign books.
None of them started at the top. They all climbed from the bottom, step by bloody step. Because of that, they knew what each part of their army and nation did and how it worked; they could control it like an extension of their own bodies.
If I want to be a general one day…
If I really want to stand at the top of a war and move armies…
How can I do that without ever having been the one at the bottom looking up?
The thought lodged in his brain and refused to leave.
He got his truck driver's license while still in university.
His reasoning was simple, very Chinese, very Zhang Ge:
He didn't want to go to Ukraine to kill anyone. He didn't care who "won" for ideology's sake. He wanted to see a modern war up close, understand how it worked, so that if anything like it ever came to China, he wouldn't be talking nonsense.
He wanted experience for his future self—the one who, in his fantasy, would wear stars on his shoulders and command real armies.
So he applied to Russian‑aligned foreign volunteer formations as a truck driver.
Logistics.
The bottom of the ladder. The arteries of the army.
He got in.
He saw more than he'd expected.
And more than he'd wanted.
Long convoys snaking through forests.
Trains creaking with tanks and ammo.
Depots hidden under ground and in basements.
Gun lines dug into tree lines.
Hospitals thrown together in abandoned buildings.
He lost three trucks to drones.
The first to crude little road spikes dropped at night—flat tires, abandoned vehicle, sprinting away before the follow‑up strike.
The second to a quadcopter that dove straight at the hood after spotting a telltale dust cloud; he'd barely had time to jump out, childhood kung‑fu flailing plus years of shooter games turning into real-world rolls and scrambles before his brain caught up.
The third to something like a small swarm of little drones. Like metal mosquitoes, they caught him out in the open while he was helping haul a wreck off the road. He had no weapon, just the broken vehicle and his own truck as cover. He ran in circles, doing ridiculous dodges and half-flips like a panicked chicken. The drones tried to smack him, missed, and when only one was left it decided to take his truck instead of chasing the idiot acrobat.
The other men laughed.
"You're cursed, Professor. Trucks die for you, you don't die for them."
They started calling him the "drone magnet," half joke, half superstition.
He did more than drive.
He volunteered for rescue runs—the most dangerous part.
Everyone knew: in Ukraine, the trench itself could be safer than the road between trench and rear. Moving in and out meant:
short‑range artillery,
mortars,
drones,
random rockets,
sometimes even enemy special forces or snipers sneaking behind the lines for ambushes.
He signed up anyway.
Car, van, battered APC—whatever had wheels. In the dead of night he drove forward when someone got hit on the way back, trying to pull them out before the enemy corrected their aim.
He learned how to:
slam tourniquets on blown‑off limbs,
drag screaming men into vehicles,
ignore the way they called for their mothers,
drive while blood soaked into the seats and explosions went off around them.
He saw detached legs lying on the road like discarded mannequins.
He saw faces that were no longer faces.
He saw what high explosive really meant.
He filmed some of it. Not the gore—he wasn't that far gone. But the aftermath. The stories. The tired, angry, broken men talking in the dark, faces blurred, locations scrubbed.
He asked them:
"What does war feel like?"
"When were you most afraid?"
"What do you want people back home to understand?"
The Russian Ministry of Defense didn't like it.
At first they tried to shut him down.
Then they realised he blurred unit insignia, blurred landscapes, hid details. In the end, someone high enough up shrugged and basically decided:
Let him. It's good propaganda, and he's not leaking anything important.
His channel exploded.
Now he wasn't just "Professor War‑Spear analysing someone else's footage."
He was "the Chinese guy actually out there."
It was nice, in a way, and he felt good about having saved not just soldiers but evacuated civilians too.
But he wanted out.
He'd seen enough—winter, summer, offensive, defence, stalemate. Every flavour of misery.
He told his parents he wanted to come home.
They said no.
"Just a bit longer. The channel is on a roll. Your little brothers and sisters need the money. We can't go back to the old life."
Over the years his foster parents had had children of their own. Now he was basically supporting them all. His parents had quietly stopped working. His money was their life raft, and they weren't about to let him step out of the boat.
So he stayed.
He didn't know how he died.
The last thing he remembered was one more "safe" stream.
Dashboard camera on.
Forest road.
Him talking, half to chat, half to himself, about another close call the day before.
Comments flew past.
"Turn it off, idiot, you'll get geolocated."
"Professor, seriously, stop streaming outside the base."
He laughed.
"I'm far from the line, my mans," he said. "Rear area. Logistics cockroach and all that—nothing can touch me."
He never heard what proved him wrong.
Just a flash—white and hot and sudden—and then nothing.
No sound.
No pain.
No slow‑motion reflection.
One frame he was alive.
The next, he wasn't. His body had probably been turned into chunks of meat, and his fourth truck, which had survived so much, was also gone.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on soft sheets, lungs burning as if he'd been underwater for hours.
He opened his eyes to a painted ceiling full of mythological Germans killing mythological Romans. The air smelled like starch and medicine. The clothes on his skin were too fine.
Later, he pieced together what had happened.
Prince Oskar had fallen down a staircase.
Prince Oskar had gone into a coma.
Doctors had said there was little hope.
The family had prayed.
And one night, Prince Oskar's heart had stopped.
He had actually died.
For a few hours, the royal palace mourned quietly. Only a single young maid named Tanya had stayed by his bed, crying. She was his personal maid, not exactly a friend—just someone who'd admired him from a distance.
Then, at dawn, the "dead" prince suddenly breathed again, thrashed, coughed, and opened his eyes.
Except it wasn't Oskar anymore.
Not inside.
It was Zhang Ge.
He felt a little guilty about that, in a distant way.
But he hadn't exactly volunteered.
He just woke up in a body that wasn't his, in a bed that had already been a deathbed.
The maid, seeing him move, was so overjoyed it took him completely off guard. She spoke rapid German to him. He looked around, tried to assess the situation as best he could.
Then he tried to act natural and speak like a German prince who was definitely still the same person.
"Y‑yes… my man," he'd said in really bad German.
From that moment on, everyone understood two things:
Prince Oskar lived.
Prince Oskar was… not quite right.
His German came from movies where German soldiers yelled a lot, a little bit of Duolingo, and some random apps. He could barely order food in a restaurant, never mind navigate 1903 court German.
Besides, his vocabulary was wrong for the era; people in 1903 didn't speak like the people in the movies he'd watched. His accent was totally off. Sometimes, under stress, Chinese leaked into his sentences or even English—modern American English, a weird mix of Black slang and meme English.
He had studied history, yes. But how had the old Oskar talked? Acted? No clue. He had no idea which servants he'd been kind to, which he'd bullied, what jokes he liked, what food he hated—or, worst of all, who all these family members were.
He was trying to play a role without a script.
He failed. A lot.
He called a marshal "my man."
He said "Guten Tag" at midnight to palace guards.
He told a maid "I'll be back," then never showed up again.
Whispers spread:
"The fall changed him."
"His head isn't right."
"A demon, maybe. Or a miracle."
He couldn't even ask people to teach him German—that was too embarrassing, and also he didn't know how to ask that in German.
So he did what he could: he began self‑studying in his room, and tried to minimise the damage.
He built a mask.
Short sentences only.
"Yes."
"No."
"Quite."
"As you say."
"Very nice, my man."
"Give me cookies now."
Face expressionless. Back straight. Blue eyes narrowed.
He became the cold, distant, possibly brain‑damaged prince who stared too much, spoke too little, and did calisthenics at dawn like a possessed lumberjack.
It worked well enough.
Important people decided to ignore his weirdness.
Servants decided he was scary.
His father decided, grudgingly, that at least this version of Oskar was not so loud anymore.
Only when he was alone did the mask slip.
That was when the fear and confusion crept in.
He'd grown up in a voice‑controlled apartment.
Now he was in a palace where even turning on the water in a tub meant wrestling with ancient plumbing. The first time he tried to operate the fixtures, he almost flooded the bathroom.
So he stopped trying. He couldn't even turn on the lamps properly, only the single candle next to his bed.
Unable to bathe like a normal prince, he tied bedsheets together, climbed out the window, and went to wash in the lake instead, like a lunatic.
Now, a year later, he sat by that same water, uniform damp, hair dripping, sideburns frosting in the winter air, and stared at the ripples.
He knew where history was going:
Naval arms race.
Entangling alliances.
A bullet in Sarajevo.
Four empires bleeding out in mud.
In his original world, Germany lost. The Kaiser ran. Millions
died for nothing worth the graves.
Here, he had maybe ten years.
Ten years to:
– get strong enough that people listened,
– make enough money to matter,
– push the right projects,
– nudge the right alliances,
– maybe even stop the war before it started.
Or at least make sure that if it came, it didn't end the same way.
He flicked a pebble into the Havel. It skipped once, then vanished.
"Ten years," he murmured in clumsy, old‑fashioned German. "Ten years before the world loses its mind."
Behind him, anyone passing saw only a tall young prince in a perfect uniform, posture rigid, eyes thoughtful.
A quiet royal son.
A minor figure in a great empire.
They didn't know he was really a Chinese truck driver, a failed kung‑fu child star, an internet military nerd with PTSD, sitting in someone else's body and trying to decide how to hijack history.
He drew in a deep breath and muttered:
"Oh man, I'm so fucked."
***
Author's Note:
Thanks so much for checking out the story!If you enjoyed Chapter 1, feel free to leave a quick comment — I'd love to hear your first impressions. Readers' thoughts really help shape the direction and improve the pacing.
If you want to support the book early, dropping a power stone or adding it to your library helps a lot more than you'd think. And if something stood out to you — good or bad — let me know. I read everything.
See you in the next chapter!