While on official business in Syria, Russian special forces officer Alexei is blown up by a mine and finds himself in the 18th century—in the body of a “grown boy,” the fifteen-year-old son of the landowner Egorov. Alyoshka, who by the traditions of his time is assigned to a guards regiment and already has the rank of junior officer, lives in his parents’ estate, and his first officer commission must wait more than a year. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire is waging a fierce war against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. The boy’s father, retired Elizabethean officer, hands him his musket—a trophy brought after the seven-year war with Prussia. With this rifled, long-range weapon, young junior officer Lyoshka Egorov is sent to the first Russian army on the Danube.