Chronicles of the Broken Beam

When the water clock in the Xuanwu Army's command hall abruptly stopped, the red crows above Bianzhou's city walls began flying backward. A useless young man awoke in a pool of blood, surrounded by the former followers of Huang Chao, whom Zhu Wen had slaughtered. In his palm lay an e-ink copy of A Study of Bianliang's Tax Revenues. As Li Keyong's Crow Army watered their horses in the Yellow River, he was using blockchain principles to restructure the debts of the military governors. When faced with the beauties of Weibo presented by Luo Shaowei, he laid out a draft for a modern civil service examination. The inertia of history took the shape of soul-chasing arrows. On the night his improved eight-ox crossbows tore through the Shatuo cavalry, the director of the Imperial Observatory pointed at the cracks in a tortoise shell and cried out in a trembling voice, "The Purple Star Emperor is rewriting the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions!" From the palace coup in Luoyang to the massacre at Baima Station, every stain recorded in the history books became a fulcrum for the butterfly effect. But when he finally snapped the last strand of the Tang imperial crown, he discovered that the copper coins newly minted in Bianjing bore, on their face, the distinctive relief design found on twenty-first-century coins.