In 210 BC, the moment Qin Shi Huang dies at Shaqiu, a crack opens in history.
Holding a fish-gut sword case concealing an imperial edict written in secret ink, Crown Prince Fusu leads the Jiuyuan cavalry through Zhao Gao’s chain of deadly traps. At the walls of Xianyang, he uses the sword of a benevolent man to cut down the bronze statue of the Epang Palace. But after ascending the throne, he discovers that he is trapped in an even more perilous game. The old Qin aristocracy is sharpening its blades, the surviving nobles of the Six Kingdoms lie in wait, Xiongnu beacons send smoke rolling across the land, and deep within the Mount Li mausoleum, three thousand bronze warriors await awakening.
Fusu introduces new policies with painstaking caution: he revises the Qin Code and annotates it with Confucian classics, turning the burning of books and burying of scholars into a grand collection of texts from the Hundred Schools. He pardons convicts and turns them into frontier troops, while a Mohist city of ingenious mechanisms rises beside the Zhengguo Canal. He takes the Chu woman Mi Zhao as his empress, unaware that the phoenix tattoo on her neck conceals the last secret order to restore Chu. As the smoke of Meng Tian’s campaign against the Xiongnu in the north and the sword-shadow of Xiang Yu’s crossing of the Wu River in the south close in at once, this idealist will finally understand: to defend Great Qin, he must first shatter the myth left behind by the First Emperor.
