A modern history grad student, a relentless workaholic, stays up until dawn wrestling with a paper. She touches the bronze sword of Li Shimin at a museum, then opens her eyes and tumbles straight into the Eastern Palace in the third year of the Zhenguan era, becoming a low-ranking female official who could be made a scapegoat at any moment!
On her first day at court, she causes a scene! Everyone is calling Emperor Yang of Sui a tyrant, and I accidentally blurt out, “The Grand Canal's benefits will last for generations.” The censors immediately accuse me of spreading heresy, and the crown prince's guards have blades at my throat!
Just as I'm about to meet my end, Li Shimin suddenly slams the table from his throne. “This woman has a brain! Appoint her as a female court reader!”
From then on, I go wild with my golden finger in the Tang dynasty:
I conduct a census to cut off the aristocratic clans' financial lifeline. That very night, a poisonous parasite crawls into my pillow, so I get Li Shimin to raid the old fox's household instead.
I ally with the Xueyantuo to deal with the Turks. When a spy disguised as a palace maid tries to stab me, I use modern self-defense techniques to pin her to the ground until she calls me Daddy.
My trade goods and horses are burned? I show up with official documents and strip the corrupt merchants of everything, leaving them with nothing but their underwear!
But trouble keeps coming: the crown prince conspires with the Turks to rebel, aristocratic clans hoard food and jack up prices in plague zones, and reforms to the imperial examinations are denounced as “destroying the rules of our ancestors”! Gripping the bronze sword imbued with spiritual energy, I fight back: I've seen how history ends, so what the hell do I have to fear?
Until Li Shimin grabs my wrist, eyes red. “Will you disappear one day, just like the spiritual energy in the sword?”
I'm thrown into a panic. After this bond between ruler and subject stretches across a thousand years, I realize I might not want us to be just “buddies”...
Dive in now! Watch a history prodigy run wild in the Zhenguan era, and turn Li Shimin from an emperor into a future hopeless romantic!
Tang Culture, Tang Dynasty