The last trace of imperial dragon energy in the Dune Palace has yet to fade when Ying Zheng opens his eyes again. The Imperial Jade Seal has become a broken hoe, and the golden-brick floors of Xianyang Palace have turned into the muddy roads of Chenjia Village. He has become “Chen Zheng,” a down-on-his-luck village chief in Zhuo Commandery at the end of the Han dynasty, whose grain stores won't last the month.
The bitter wind of the Jiuyuan frontier still howls in his ears. Meng Tian has just cleaved a Xiongnu scimitar in two, only to tumble into a desolate mountain wilderness. After snapping a tiger's neck with his bare hands, he gets a pat on the shoulder from his new “village chief”: “Meng Tian, you take the post at the village entrance. Don't let those thugs steal the chickens.”
The Grand Marshal of Qin has become the “village gate guard.” The First Emperor, who unified the Six States, has to squat on the ridge of a field teaching villagers to grow millet from Qin and dig irrigation canals the Qin way. Even when Zhang San steals half a sack of bran from Li Si's family, he brings out a simplified version of the Qin Code to settle the case. The villagers whisper among themselves: the chief always talks as if he plans to govern the whole world, and that man at the village entrance is even stranger. He can take on ten Yellow Turban rebels with a locust-wood spear as if it were nothing, but even when chickens fight, he has to decide who's right according to “the rules.”
No one knows that the two “odd fellows” spend their nights in an earthen house drawing not a village map, but the borders of a world to be remade. Meng Tian is guarding not the village entrance, but the first post for the future elite soldiers of Qin. Ying Zheng is teaching not farming, but preparing to make Chenjia Village a new “Xianyang.” Starting with this little patch of land, he will train elite soldiers using Qin's farming-and-warfare system, restore order to a chaotic age with Qin law, and have Meng Tian lead his iron cavalry to sweep away the heroes of the Three Kingdoms, planting Qin's black banners across the land once more.
After all, guarding the village entrance is only the first step for the Ancestral Dragon. What he wants is, starting from...
I like to see the First Emperor go to the Three Kingdoms and unify the Three Kingdoms, and see how the First Emperor defeated Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, Guo Jia, Zhou Yu, and Jia Xu.
Meng Tian traveled hundreds of years to the end of Han Dynasty