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Kang Mu-yeol was once the empire's greatest commander — a war hero who held the northern border together with strategy, discipline, and brutal battlefield logic. But when corrupt nobles needed a scapegoat, they branded him a traitor and executed him under the very victory banners he had earned with his soldiers' blood. Then he wakes again, this time as Yi Seo-jun: the emperor's ignored, sickly bastard son, a prince the court expects to live and die as a forgotten embarrassment. That is their first mistake.
Inside this discarded body is the mind of a commander who has already watched the empire rot once from the inside. Seo-jun quickly discovers he has access to the Dead General's War Ledger — a mental tactical tool that lets him simulate and analyze military and political logistics with terrifying precision. He uses it first on something small and humiliating: the palace servants who steal his food. Asserting authority for the first time in his weak new life, he begins to claw back the respect the court refuses to give him.
This episode follows Seo-jun's quiet, calculated rise from ignored prince to a threat no one sees coming. He begins a secret regimen of physical training and information gathering, realizing that the empire is being hollowed out by the same logistical corruption that doomed his first life. Every insult becomes intelligence; every slight becomes a map of who profits from the rot. When the palace summons him to the Moon Banquet — a tactical exhibition meant to mock and expose him — Seo-jun decides to turn their humiliation into his stage. The dead commander has been given a second chance to save the empire that killed him, and this time he intends to win entirely on his own terms.