The world smelled of blood and old smoke.

  Jonathan Miller woke to pain—dull, but deep—gnawing at his ribs. His lungs burned. Each breath felt like sucking air through a cracked straw. He tried to move but his arms wouldn’t respond. The ground was cold beneath him, stone-hard, and uneven.

  He blinked against the light—dim, yellow, flickering.

  He wasn’t dead?

  No, wait. He was.

  He remembered it clearly.

  Helmand Province. The screaming. The Afghan heat, the RPG's shockwave. He and his unit were moving through a wadi, caught between orders and instinct. It was supposed to be a recon operation in some half-abandoned village.

  Instead, it was a kill box. A perfect ambush.

  He remembered the crack of gunfire, the thump of IEDs ripping the earth apart, the smell of burning tires. They'd fallen one by one. He remembered calling for support. No one came.

  Darkness.

  And now... this?

  "Otto!"

  Someone shouted. The voice was too close, sharp with panic.

  "Otto, verdammt, stay with us!"

  He flinched.

  Otto?

  Jonathan tried to sit up, but pain tore through his side and he gasped. Hands grabbed him, held him down.

  "Don’t move. You’ll make it worse."

  Another voice. This one calm, clipped, older. A doctor?

  Jonathan’s vision blurred, but between the swaying shadows and the dull glow of a chandelier, he saw a tall ceiling. Wooden. Ornate. Old. Not a hospital. Not even a field tent.

  “Where…?” he rasped. Even his voice sounded different. Thicker. A touch of something in the pronunciation.

  “Be still, Herr von Bismarck,” the doctor said.

  And that’s when everything stopped.

  Bismarck?

  No way.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He fought through the haze, blinking hard, trying to sit up despite the restraints. His chest was wrapped tight in linen. His arms looked... pale. Long fingers. No scars. No callouses. The dog tags were gone.

  This is not his body.

  This is not his world.

  He twisted, eyes darting to the nearby wall. A mirror caught the light, and in it—he saw a stranger.

  A young man, barely thirty, red-haired, with sharp gray eyes and a strong jaw. Regal. Cold. Wounded. A face he’d only seen in black-and-white portraits from college textbooks.

  It was Bismarck.

  He’d somehow woken up in the body of Otto. Freaking. von. Bismarck.

  Jonathan Miller, Staff Sergeant of the 101st Airborne, was now occupying the battered, shot-up frame of one of the most dangerous political minds in European history.

  His pulse spiked. A monitor should’ve beeped. But there was no equipment. Just candles. Wood. Cold linen sheets. The sound of horses in the street outside.

  He wasn’t in the 21st century anymore.

  He wasn’t even in his own body.

  He fell back into the mattress, trying to breathe. In. Out. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. Think.

  Had he gone insane? Was this death? Purgatory? A coma-fueled fever dream?

  “Your duel… Herr von Bismarck,” the doctor said quietly, mistaking the panic for memory loss. “A bullet to the ribs, thank God it missed the lung.”

  Duel.

  Right. This Bismarck had just fought a duel. Probably lost it—or nearly died—and that’s when Jonathan had slipped in. An empty vessel, filled by mistake?

  Or worse... intentionally.

  The room blurred again. He passed out.

  He woke hours—or maybe days—later. Stronger. Clearer.

  They let him sit up now. He’d been moved to a grand room somewhere in what looked like a minor noble’s estate—high ceilings, tall windows with heavy drapes, antique furniture that probably wasn’t antique yet.

  The clothes they left him were absurdly formal: a black waistcoat, high collar, thick woolen trousers. Not a zipper in sight.

  He dressed slowly, every movement aching.

  Then came the visitors.

  First: a thin, hawk-eyed man in a conservative frock coat who introduced himself as Herr von Sch?nhausen, a distant cousin. Loyal, stiff, suspicious. His handshake lasted too long. His gaze never left Jonathan’s eyes.

  Next: a balding priest. Asked if he’d found God after the duel.

  Jonathan almost laughed.

  And finally: a messenger bearing a sealed letter from a certain Count von Arnim, inviting Bismarck to Berlin. “When your health allows, of course,” the boy said, bowing too deeply.

  Berlin.

  So it really was happening. This was real. He was in Prussia, probably in the 1840s if he remembered his timelines right. Right before the real chaos began. Right before the revolutions, the wars, the unification, the tangled diplomatic web that ended with the powder keg of World War I.

  Only… here, maybe not the same.

  He remembered enough from history to know things felt off. The map in the study had strange borders. Austria looked stronger. Russia’s territory pushed further west than it should. A newspaper he found on a desk mentioned the Qing Empire clashing with the Tsarists over "northern trade routes"—a war that shouldn’t have ever happened.

  Something was different. Subtly. Dangerously.

  And now he was in the middle of it all.

  Jonathan—no, Bismarck, he reminded himself—sat before the mirror again that night, candle flickering low, watching the face that was now his.

  He remembered what Bismarck had become: the architect of German unity, the chessmaster of Europe, feared and admired in equal measure.

  And now he wore that face.

  He didn’t know who brought him here. Or why. But he knew one thing with dead certainty:

  He couldn’t waste the opportunity.

  He was a man reborn in a world already trembling with change. A man who knew how badly history could go if left unchecked.

  He wasn’t just going to survive.

  He was going to win.

  He needed to win.

  Even if it meant becoming something darker. Something ruthless. A true Iron Chancellor.

  One thought echoed in his mind as he stared at the candle:

  "Blood and Iron… huh? Yeah. Why not."