[History] + [Alternate History] + [Rural Life] + [Human Nature]
The smell of blood and rust has yet to fade from Huaishuo when Gao Huan’s modern memories awaken inside the body of Gao Huan, a Northern Wei garrison soldier. The land is ravaged by famine, and Rouran cavalry trample across it. Forced to use gunpowder and stirrups to knock on hell’s gates, he scatters lime to save people in the mass grave of the Heyin Incident and dances a dangerous game of political intrigue at the tip of Erzhu Rong’s blade.
The real nightmare begins on the battlefield at Hanling. When the remnants of his old enemy Yuwen Tai’s forces leave behind a charred gunpowder jar, Gao Huan realizes that this black otter from the western frontier has also laid hands on the forbidden knowledge of a transmigrator! In an age when two suns hang in the sky, a rain of fire at Mount Mang destroys his massive siege cannons, the plague at Yubi gives rise to shamanic prophecies, and Erzhu Yunhuang, who takes a poisoned arrow meant for him, reveals the truth of reincarnation with her dying breath. The Hephthalite priestess who wielded chemical miracles was no more than another speck of dust in the turbulence of spacetime.
After ten years of conquest, gunpowder cavalry crush the Western Regions at Talas, while hot-air balloons flatten Jiangnan from the skies above Jiankang. When the power of the Nine Tripods is finally in his hands, Gao Huan lets Lou Zhaojun go at the Yellow River crossing as she takes her child and bids him farewell. He personally hands the empire to his violent son, leaving the ministers to tear at this prematurely aging beast, while he fakes his death and disappears into a fishing village in Liuqiu.
Then one evening, the sound of children playing drifts in on the sea breeze. A song dancing across the sand mingles the waters of Li Bai’s Yellow River with the lanes of Jacky Cheung’s “Kiss Goodbye.” Notes that should not exist for another thousand years are now gnawing at the historical stele he bought with mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.
Will civilization ultimately travel through time?
Or has the Demon King never escaped the prison of fate?
