Li Muyun, a historical researcher, transmigrates to the Wu Zhou era with a jade hairpin in hand and becomes the son of a disgraced official whose family was wiped out. In Luoyang's Ghost Market, he uses his knowledge of chemistry to boil a voodoo doll and prove his innocence. At the Hall of Supreme Harmony, he presents the Female Emperor with a Five-Year Plan written in simplified characters. On a wall at Ganye Temple, he catches Wu Meiniang writing a love poem to Li Zhi, only to have a golden hairpin pressed to his throat. “Those eyes of yours should have been dug out and fed to the dogs long ago.”
When history books become scripts that can be rewritten, he conjures the Buddha's radiance, establishes schools for women, and teaches Wu Zetian to use “KPIs” to assess her ruthless officials. Yet he discovers that he is nothing more than a pawn in a scheme Li Yifu set in motion twenty years ago. The jade hairpin bears the cracks of three cycles of reincarnation, and a secret message in simplified characters turns out to have come from an archaeological team in 203. The aging Female Emperor gazes at him in the mirror: “Do I want this age of prosperity, or do I want to keep you?”
Modern technology collides with the political machinations of the High Tang, and an office worker's mindset clashes with the Female Emperor's cunning. This time, he must choose his place among the gears of history: will he be the strategist who reshapes the realm, or the blade hidden in the Female Emperor's sleeve, sharp enough to kill with a single strike?
