The Stranger Who Returned

The night Berlin fell, in 1945. Chen Jing'an, a Chinese scientist harboring a secret, activates the forbidden weapon known as the Time Vault, capable of tearing through space and time. Amid the ashes of history, he tries to seize an anchor that could change his homeland's fate.

He succeeds, yet fails all the same.

The Time Vault hurls him back to Jinling, the city of his dreams, but not to any era he knows. This is the Three Kingdoms, a land consumed by war. Clad in his tattered suit, carrying his grandfather's ivory abacus and a cold pocket watch, he is surrounded by the spears of sharp-eyed Eastern Wu soldiers as a suspicious outsider. The ink on the letter from home, saying, “The camellias in Jinling have put forth new shoots,” is barely dry. Before him lies a completely unfamiliar hometown, and cold arrowheads are pointed his way.

He carries knowledge from more than a thousand years in the future, and the scars of the twentieth century are seared into his heart. In this age of heroes and schemes, will he be a “mystic” who can see what lies ahead, or a “spy” harboring sinister intentions? As the flood of history, the Guixu, bears down on him, can this lone bird returned from the apocalypse find a foothold of his own and become the anchor of the Guixu, the lever that shifts the fate of Huaxia?

History awaits his hand to write it anew. And out on the river, the flagship of the “Grand Commander” is slowly approaching...