In the eighth year of Daye under the Sui, Liaodong was a sea of blood and mountains of corpses.
Chen Xiao, an archaeologist, transmigrated into the body of a condemned prisoner sent to fill in a moat. With three arrows in him and on the verge of death, he bonded with the [System for Conquering the Chaotic Age]. When a cold blade severed a fellow soldier’s hand as it reached for a medicine bottle, and a fourteen-year-old boy pressed the last half-piece of rat meat into his palm, he swore over the bloodied back of a corpse: “This world that devours people? I’ll tear it down!”
From a defeated soldier at the Salsu River to the lord of Wolf Den Stronghold, he used the System’s Yunnan Baiyao to save an orphan girl and shot through Eulji Mundeok’s throat with a Bow of the Overlord. From a foot soldier in Dou Jiande’s camp to a northern warlord, he used crucible steel to forge armor-piercing Mo Dao blades, then wielded the thunder of gunpowder to shatter the thousand-year-old gates of the Five Great Clans. Outside Hulao Pass, Western cannons roared, rewriting the history of Li Shimin capturing two emperors. On the banks of the Wei River, poisonous clouds of plague smoke rose, turning the tide of a crisis as two hundred thousand Turkic cavalry bore down on the realm.
In the final battle on Zhuque Avenue, the Mo Dao formation shattered the Black-Armored Cavalry. When the bloodstained banner bearing the character Qian was raised over the walls of Chang’an, Chen Xiao placed the family letters of Hu Dajia, Han Er’s dried rat meat, and Dugu Ning’s jade pendant in the Imperial Ancestral Temple. At the founding ceremony of the new dynasty, he cut apart the Imperial Jade Seal. “The so-called Mandate of Heaven is a steamed bun in the hands of a starving man, a winter coat on an orphan’s back. From this day on, the living will rule this world!”
