Conversations with Luo Guanzhong

The moment Tang Yun, a restorer of ancient books, touched a Ming-dynasty edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, his consciousness crossed six centuries and connected with Luo Guanzhong, who was writing the book at the time.

At midnight, the two eras began to speak: the modern scholar brought archaeological discoveries and the perspective of later generations, while the Ming-dynasty writer shared his creative struggles and the taboos of his time. They discussed why Guan Yu was deified, how Cao Cao was vilified, and what lay hidden behind the chapters about women that had been deleted. But every attempt to seek the "truth of history" sent ripples through time: the words in the modern-day Records of the Three Kingdoms began to blur, and the ink on Luo Guanzhong's desk flowed backward.

Caught between the shadow of literary inquisitions and academic doubts, the two discovered that the greatest danger was not changing history, but the price of understanding it. When Luo Guanzhong decided to burn his unpublished original manuscript, Tang Yun buried a time capsule in the modern era. Together, they protected a secret: classics are not mirrors of history, but an eternal dialogue between every age and the past.

This is a metafictional novel about creation, memory, and cultural heritage. It asks whose faces we truly see in Romance of the Three Kingdoms: the heroes of the late Han, the writers of the early Ming, or ourselves?