O Tigre Astuto da Família Humilde

Northern frontier of Shuozhou, inside the Poplar Fortress.

Winter’s chill wind swept across the entire city. In a dilapidated shack, Yu Chengfeng suddenly opened his eyes, gulping down the icy air.

As a chemistry teacher, his instincts upon awakening were to quickly survey his surroundings.

The roof above was crumbling, beams gnawed by rats and moths, and walls patched haphazardly with mud and straw—all exuded a sense of decay.

Once he had fully absorbed the memories of this body, he could not deny the fact: he had crossed into another world.

He had been a chemistry teacher. On his way to work, he witnessed a child drowning in a river. He managed to save the child, but exhausted himself in the process. Darkness claimed him, and when he awoke, he found himself in this strange world.

The nation he now found himself in was called Northern Yan, a land still ruled by feudal traditions.

Perhaps by the will of fate, the original owner of this body was also named Yu Chengfeng, a conscripted soldier whose parents had both passed away, and whose only sister had married and left the household.

The Poplar Fortress was a military settlement of Northern Yan, where men became soldiers in times of war and farmers in times of peace.

No foreign enemy had threatened this place for decades. The soldier-families here had long lost their fighting spirit, living lives no different from the peasants. Yet recently, with the bitter cold settling in, the Tatars on the steppe had set their sights on the south, provoking several skirmishes. Now,