The Iron Curtain: I Help the First Emperor Conquer the Six Kingdoms

A transmigrator and the blood-and-fire journey of an emperor for the ages

Chen Heng, a modern strategic expert, unexpectedly transmigrates to the final years of the Warring States period and becomes a low-ranking official in the Qin Court of Judicial Review, barely clinging to life. Armed with his foreknowledge of history and strategies far beyond his time, he quickly catches the attention of the young Ying Zheng, becoming the future “emperor for the ages’” most secretive adviser.

In an age of bloody conquest, Chen Heng helps Ying Zheng reshape the strategy of “allying with distant states and attacking nearby ones,” establish the “Black Ice Platform” intelligence network, and use cryptography and intelligence warfare to dismantle the six states’ alliances. He improves the range of Qin crossbows and invents “compressed rations,” but finds himself caught in court intrigue after his innovations threaten the nobility’s interests. He champions the commandery-and-county system and unifies the written language and currency, becoming the empire’s unsparing enforcer of institutional change.

Yet the road to unification is stained with blood: the devastation of flooding Xinzheng, the atrocities of the massacre at Yingchen, and the controversy of burning books and burying scholars alive... When the six realms finally unite, Chen Heng realizes he has long been caught in a whirlpool of power and morality. On the night of the upheaval at Sand Dune, Ying Zheng dies, and political machinations begin anew. Falsely accused of treason by Zhao Gao, Chen Heng fakes his death and escapes, burying the reflections of a lifetime in his book, The Book of Balance, beside the First Emperor’s mausoleum.

Two thousand years later, when this “diagnosis of civilization” resurfaces, the struggles and choices of a transmigrator caught in the currents of history are finally revealed. Did he shape the mandate of heaven, or was he consumed by it? In this epic of political intrigue, war, and questions of human nature, the answer may lie in the fractures hidden behind the iron curtain.

“In an age of great strife, no war is just, but the spark of civilization never dies in the cracks of the iron curtain.”

Chen Heng’s final letter