Transmigration

Late at night

Li Mu looked at the classically elegant yet luxurious room, then at his cold iron bed. No matter how he looked at them, something felt off.

Li Mu let out a helpless sigh. Two years!

That was right: Li Mu had transmigrated. His name was now Franz Joseph—the old emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from history, and the leading man in Princess Sisi's love story.

He was the grandson of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, the eldest son of Archduke Franz Karl, and the child of Princess Sophie Friederike, daughter of Maximilian I, King of Bavaria.

(Franz Joseph I, founder of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the last emperor of the House of Habsburg, was born on August 18, 1830. He ascended the throne on December 2, 1848, and died on November 21, 1916.)

It was as if God had played a joke on Franz. In his early years, he lived a fairy-tale life, with an exceptionally beautiful queen, adorable children, and a mighty empire under his command.

In his youth, Franz had lived up to the title of emperor. He had kept his people, his country, his nation, and the woman he loved dearly safe and proud.

Sadly, it had all been like a dream of the southern bough. In his later years, everything took a sudden turn for the worse.

His younger brother was executed by firing squad in Mexico, his wife was stabbed to death in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, and his son died by suicide at a young age.

His chosen heir was then assassinated by the Serbian Black Hand. The retaliatory war he launched in response sent tens of millions into a sea of blood and brought down the empire he had devoted his life to building.

Franz's uncle, the current emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, could not have children because of a congenital defect. Franz had been groomed as the empire's heir from an early age.

As the heir to the empire, he had said goodbye to the happy life of childhood. As for the nobles' debauched, luxurious lives, those had nothing to do with Franz at all.

Study, study, and more study. From the moment he was born, Franz had undergone the strictest training.

He slept on a cold military cot and had to get up at four every morning. After washing with cold water, he began the morning prayers of a devout Catholic at the little prayer stand by his bed, then embarked on twelve hours of study.

Neither the bitter depths of winter nor the scorching heat of midsummer ever changed that.

Soon after Li Mu transmigrated, snow blanketed Vienna. The first time he took a cold shower in winter, he thought he was done for. Yet his body turned out to be surprisingly strong; he didn't even catch a cold.

More than seven hundred days and nights were enough to change a great deal. Li Mu was Franz now, and he hadn't known he had such strong willpower. People really were made by circumstance.

Over these past two years, Li Mu—no, Franz now—had retained most of his predecessor's habits.

A lot of the time, he wondered whether his memories of his previous life had all been a dream.

After carefully comparing the course of history, Franz discovered with a helpless sigh that this world was exactly the same as the one he had known in his previous life. Even the potato shortage in the German lands remained unchanged.

As a history enthusiast, he had spent plenty of time studying Austrian history in his previous life. He knew that the Austrian Empire, which seemed to flourish on the surface, was already strong on the outside but weak within. All it would take was the slightest push for it to come crashing down.

On the surface, the Austrian Empire was still at the height of its power. As the driving force behind the Congress of Vienna and the architect of Europe's postwar order after the Anti-French War, it was now playing the role of Europe's gendarme.

No one knew that this vast old empire would collapse in the revolution two years later. If the Great Powers hadn't needed it to survive, the Austrian Empire would have become history in 1849.

Even though it barely survived, the Austrian Empire began to decline from then on.

Diplomatic failures led to a string of military defeats. First came the Austro-French War, then the Austro-Prussian War. Even the Italians managed to bite off a piece of Austria.

One defeat after another undermined the central government's authority. In the end, it was forced to compromise, transforming the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The founding of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been full of chance. Franz didn't dare bet that he could do a better job than his predecessor. Saving the Austrian Empire was now his medium-term goal.

Of course, he could also choose to run away, give up his claim to the throne, and live as an ordinary person—find somewhere safe and become a happy capitalist.

Sadly, after two years of noble life, ambition had already taken root in Franz.

Life was short, a mere few hurried decades. Since he had transmigrated and could stand atop the world, riding the tide of the times, why should he retreat?

Night had fallen deep. Franz continued refining his plan to save the country. He had already revised it countless times.

"Archduke, it's time for class!" a maid reminded him softly.

The maid's voice woke Franz from his sleep.

"Got it!" Franz replied helplessly.

He was a model student now, with dozens of subjects—politics, history, philosophy, languages, religion, and more—and he could get an average passing grade in all of them.

That was right: add together his grades in every subject and calculate the average, and he could just barely pass. If he failed, he could always round up.

He was definitely a good student. Compared with his two younger brothers, who studied alongside him, Franz was an honor student, at any rate.

Of course, that was only because the standards were different. His mother, Lady Sophie, demanded that he do everything to the best of his ability, while her standards for his two younger sons were simply to do well enough.

In Franz's view, this kind of education was fundamentally a failure. Too much of the coursework had to be memorized by rote, leaving no time at all for reflection.

There was no helping it. The House of Habsburg had suffered a setback at the time. His father and uncle were both born with their wits in short supply, and the family's tradition of educating its heirs had been interrupted. The imperial arts, once passed down orally from generation to generation, had died out.

His mother, Sophie, had arranged all these lessons herself. She was a devout Catholic who believed that an emperor's heir had to be strong, and that any display of emotion would be disastrous. She was especially strict with Franz.

Besides learning his mother tongue, Franz could write letters in French at eight. At eleven, he learned Magyar, Czech, and Italian. At thirteen, he began studying Latin and Greek...

Sadly, he hadn't inherited his predecessor's gift for learning. Once he had exhausted the foundation his predecessor left behind, Franz's grades had gone from bad to worse.

The Franz of history, fluent in eight languages and able to converse in nearly every language spoken by the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was long gone. All that remained was a failing student named Franz, struggling to pass.