The end came not with a bang, but with silence.
Mikhail Volkov lay in the dark, a flickering screen casting cold light across a shattered bunker. His breath was shallow, lungs filled with dust and the stench of melting plastic. All around him, the remnants of a world war—the final world war—groaned beneath tons of concrete and radiation-soaked steel.
He couldn't move. Not anymore. A beam pinned his legs. His side was numb. He had minutes left, maybe.
He watched the screen one last time. The news feed, still running off emergency solar, listed the latest confirmed dead: Moscow—gone. Beijing—glassed. Berlin—silent. New York—vaporized.
He laughed. A hoarse, broken thing.
"We built so much," he rasped. "And destroyed it even better."
He was a historian. An economist. An engineer. Once a celebrated systems analyst for Eurasia's largest infrastructure firm. Once a guest lecturer on imperial collapses. Once a dreamer who believed civilization could course-correct.
Not anymore.
His hand, bloodied and trembling, reached into the inside pocket of his coat. He pulled out a small black notebook—his lifework. Annotated models of imperial resilience, forgotten economic theories, revolutionary technologies never funded, and pages filled with diagrams of "what could've been."
He flipped to the last page and scrawled three words:
"Too late. Again."
Then everything went white.
Cold air slapped him awake.
Mikhail gasped and sat upright, expecting to feel steel, pain, heat. Instead, he tasted stone. Dust. Candle smoke. His fingers brushed raw brick.
He looked down—his hands were clean. Unscarred. Younger.
His legs—whole.
A jolt of panic surged. He patted himself—coat gone. Modern boots replaced by worn leather. His eyes adjusted to flickering torchlight. He sat on a straw cot in what looked like a palace dungeon.
The door creaked.
A soldier stepped in—epaulettes of the old Russian Imperial Guard. Blue sash. Flintlock. A saber at his hip.
"Prince Mikhail Alexeyevich," the guard sneered. "You've been summoned."
Mikhail froze. Prince? Alexeyevich?
It clicked like a hammer blow. The sash. The flintlock. The Russian.
A voice whispered in his mind, ancient and synthetic.
[Sovereign Protocol Activating...]
[Subject Identified: Mikhail Alexeyevich Romanov]
[Date: December 13th, 1825 | Location: St. Petersburg, Russian Empire]
[Primary Objective: Reforge the Russian Empire]
[System Status: Booting...]
[Legacy Rating: S-Tier Potential Detected]
He staggered to his feet. The guard scowled, muttered something about nobles and madness, and shoved him forward.
This isn't a dream, Mikhail thought. This is a reset.
He remembered. December 1825—Tsar Alexander was dead. A succession crisis loomed. The Decembrist Uprising was two days away.
Russia stood on a knife's edge. Behind in industry. Fragile in identity. A beast of land, with no brain to direct it.
Mikhail exhaled slowly, pulse pounding.
He had lived through the end of history. Now he stood at the beginning of a new one.
Not again, he thought. I won't let it all burn.
The system flared again.
[Tutorial Initiated: Sovereign Protocol]
[You have been chosen to reshape the destiny of an empire. All progress will be measured through Legacy Points (LP), earned through strategic reforms, historical interventions, and imperial success.]
[Initial Objective: Survive. Influence the succession crisis. Gain political capital. Tier I Goal: Rise to Power.]
As he was led up the torchlit stairwell toward his first audience with destiny, Mikhail smiled.
This time, he would not be too late.
He would be the Tsar who reforged the empire in iron.