When the parchment scrolls in the ancient books library become quantum interfaces, history student Lu Zixiu touches the bloodiest truth of the Three Kingdoms era:
In the bitter winter of 208 AD, a scroll titled Map of the Nine Provinces and Rivers hurls Lu Zixiu into a battlefield from hell. Nanomachines lie beneath the broken swords and shattered armor at Changban Slope. Liquid metal flows across Zhao Yun's silver armor. The southeast wind at Red Cliffs is actually a lethal program unleashed by a geomagnetic weapon. Here, Hua Tuo's mechanical eye records genetic experiments to clone Cao Cao, the bronze cauldron on Zhuge Liang's Seven Star Altar burns with cold nuclear fusion, and hidden deep within the Imperial Seal is a civilization-selection protocol that has endured for two thousand years.
Lu Zixiu soon discovers that he is not the only one who has transmigrated. His modern mentor, Chen Mingyuan, commands an ironclad battleship as it bombards Wu's naval base. His girlfriend, Lin Yuwei, is trapped inside a quantum computer, while the mechanical hounds of the Space-Time Administration (SSP) use famous historical generals as Hosts to carry out the ultimate plan, codenamed "Red Cliffs Protocol." By triggering seven space-time explosions, they intend to unlock a dimensional weapon and reduce human civilization to a laboratory specimen.
With a jade pendant that can rewrite reality in his left hand and torn pages of history leaking code from the future in his right, Lu Zixiu fights alongside seven versions of himself from different timelines at the four-dimensional Red Cliffs. As the Green Dragon Crescent Blade cleaves open the folds of space-time and the bronze sacred tree bursts from beneath Sanxingdui to pierce the SSP mothership, he must choose: let the waters of the Yangtze in 208 AD flood the cities of 2023, or offer himself as a sacrifice and plant the seed of humanity in a loophole in the civilization-selection program.
