Transmigration

Late at night.

Li Mu looked at the room, which was both classical and luxurious, then looked at his own cold iron bed. No matter how he looked at it, it felt awkward.

Li Mu sighed helplessly. Two years!

That's right, Li Mu had transmigrated. He was now called Franz Joseph, the very same old emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from history, the protagonist of Empress Sisi's love story.

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

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

It was as if God had played a joke on Franz. In his early years, he lived a fairy-tale life, possessing an exceptionally beautiful empress, lovely children, and control over a powerful empire.

In his youth, Franz was worthy of the title of Emperor. He made his people, his country, his nation, and the woman he loved feel safe and proud because of him.

Unfortunately, this was like a fleeting dream; by his later years, everything took a sharp turn for the worse.

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

His chosen heir was then assassinated by the Serbian Black Hand. The retaliatory war he launched for this caused tens of millions to fall into a sea of blood, and it also caused the empire he had spent his life fighting for to collapse in the midst of the conflict.

Franz's uncle, the current Emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, could not have children due to congenital defects, so Franz had been groomed as the heir to the empire from an early age.

As the heir to the empire, a happy childhood had bid him farewell. As for the decadent, luxurious lives of the nobility, that was even more out of the question; it had absolutely nothing to do with Franz.

Study, study, and study some more. From the moment he was born, Franz had been subjected to the strictest training.

Sleeping on a cold military cot, he had to get up at four o'clock every morning. After washing with cold water, he would begin the morning prayers of a devout Catholic at the small prayer desk by his bed, followed by twelve hours of study.

Whether it was the dead of winter or the dog days of summer, this never changed.

When he first arrived, snow covered Vienna. Washing in cold water during that first freezing winter, Li Mu thought he was done for, but to his surprise, his body was unexpectedly robust—he didn't even catch a cold.

Seven hundred days and nights were enough to change many things. Now, Li Mu was already Franz. He didn't even know his own willpower was this strong; truly, people are forged by necessity.

Over these two years, Li Mu—no, he was Franz now—had retained most of the original owner's habits.

Many times, he wondered if his memories of his past life were just a dream.

After carefully comparing historical developments, Franz discovered with resignation that this world was exactly the same as the one he had experienced in his past life, right down to the potato crop failure in the German regions.

As a history enthusiast, he had studied Austrian history extensively in his past life. He knew that the seemingly flourishing Austrian Empire was actually a hollow shell; it only needed a gentle push to come crashing down.

On the surface, the current Austrian Empire was still at its zenith. As the leader of the Congress of Vienna and the architect of the European order after the Napoleonic Wars, it was currently acting as the "Gendarme of Europe."

No one knew that this massive empire would collapse in the revolution two years later. If not for the fact that the Great Powers needed it to exist, the Austrian Empire would have become history in 1849.

Even if it barely survived, the Austrian Empire would decline from that point on.

Diplomatic failures led to a series of military defeats: first the failure of the Second Italian War of Independence, then the Austro-Prussian War, and even the Italians managed to bite a piece off Austria.

A series of failures struck at the authority of the central government, eventually forcing a compromise: the transformation of the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The establishment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in history was full of contingency. Franz dared not bet that he could do better than the original owner. Saving the Austrian Empire was now his medium-term goal.

Of course, he could also choose to escape, renounce his right to the throne, become an ordinary person, and find a safe place to be a happy capitalist.

Unfortunately, after two years of aristocratic life, Franz's ambition had already begun to sprout.

Life is short, passing in a mere few decades. Since he had transmigrated once and could stand at the pinnacle of the world to become a trendsetter of the era, why should he shrink back?

The night was already deep. Franz continued to refine his plan to save the country; he had lost count of how many times he had revised it.

"Archduke, it is time for your lessons!" the maid reminded him softly.

The maid's voice pulled Franz from his sleep.

"I know!" Franz said helplessly.

He was a model student now. Politics, history, philosophy, languages, religion... he managed to get an average passing grade in dozens of subjects.

That's right, he just added up the scores of all his subjects and calculated the average to barely pass. If he didn't pass, he would just round up.

He was definitely a good student. Compared to his two younger brothers who studied with him, Franz was, at the very least, an honor student.

Of course, this was the result of different standards. His mother, Lady Sophie, demanded that he be the best, while the standard for his two younger brothers was just to get by.

In Franz's view, this education was essentially a failure. Too much of the curriculum required rote memorization, leaving no time for actual thought.

There was no help for it; the Habsburg family had suffered a crisis. Both his father and his uncle were intellectually deficient, leading to a gap in the family's traditional education. The imperial statecraft that had been passed down orally was thus interrupted.

These courses were arranged by his mother, Sophie. She was a devout Catholic who believed that as the heir to the throne, one must be strong and that any display of emotion was catastrophic. She was exceptionally strict with Franz.

Besides his native language, Franz could write letters in French by age 8, learned Hungarian, Czech, and Italian by age 11, and began delving into Latin and Greek at 13...

Unfortunately, he hadn't inherited the original owner's genius genes. After exhausting the foundation left by the original owner, Franz's academic performance went from bad to worse.

The Franz of history, who was fluent in eight languages and could converse in almost every ethnic language of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was long gone. Now, there was only a struggling student—Franz—striving for a passing grade.