Rather than a power fantasy, this leans more toward mystery and strategy.
The Great Xuan Dynasty has stood for three hundred years, its history recorded in grand chronicles no one has ever questioned.
That is, until Song Zhao discovers that the Crown Prince’s name has been stolen, and realizes the dynasty has been a lie from beginning to end.
Following the Soul-Suppressing Jade, he digs deeper. The truth is far more terrifying than a usurpation: what the jade suppresses is no lingering soul. Zhao Kuangyin has never left. His dynasty was violently cut short, his realm taken over, his name erased. Even the character “Song” became taboo. The so-called founding of Great Xuan was nothing but a three-hundred-year theft.
What they stole was not the throne, but the nation’s fortune.
The founding emperor of Great Xuan siphoned away seventy percent of the Great Song’s fortune and poured it into his own bloodline. From then on, every emperor was a thief: before ascending the throne, they had neither name nor family name, because they never deserved one. They fed on Zhao Kuangyin’s fortune while using the Soul-Suppressing Jade to pin him beneath the earth, keeping him neither dead nor alive and draining him day after day.
Back at the wine shop, his three disciples are still bickering, as if the unpleasantness at the emperor’s palace had all been a dream.
Song Zhao looks at them and suddenly smiles.
The Great Song’s fortune has been buried for three hundred years, trapped beneath the lies of an entire dynasty. Yet the one to expose those lies is none other than him, a good-for-nothing, accompanied by a wooden-headed man who can’t find decent wine to buy, a former patrol officer who resigned and has nowhere to put his energy, and a down-and-out Crown Prince nobody respects.
Wind stirs outside the window.
“Master,” Luo Tingyu looks up. “What did you say just now?”
Song Zhao tosses aside his rag and pushes open the wine shop door.
“I said it’s time to pay the debt.”
