When history is spoiled, rebels rise to resist.
Chu Yan, a graduate student in history, transmigrates to the end of the Qin dynasty and becomes an alchemist who tests poisons for Qin Shi Huang. Just as he struggles to stay alive, the sky splits open and a colossal screen called the sky screen descends, laying bare the bloody future of the Qin Empire’s fall after just two generations and the conflict between Chu and Han.
Armed with knowledge from beyond his time, Chu Yan becomes the empire’s only person capable of interpreting the sky screen. He tries to guide history toward a less painful path, but in doing so triggers the most terrifying backlash of all: the Correctors of History.
They are powerful figures whose fates have been spoiled for them: Zhao Gao, who refuses to accept his own execution; Sima Yi, who has glimpsed the bloody night at Gaoping Tombs; Wu Zhao, who has foreseen the end of her reign as empress. They refuse to become mere footnotes in the history books. Willing to turn an entire era into a chessboard and billions of lives into stakes, they vow to tear up the script fate has laid out for them.
From the ashes of the Qin fires to the flames of Red Cliffs, and then to the upheaval at Xuanwu Gate, Chu Yan struggles forward through a history whose secrets have been laid bare, clutching a mysterious bronze mirror. Every time he intervenes out of kindness, the Correctors strike back more furiously, and stranger disturbances in time and space follow. The butterfly effect of history ultimately becomes a storm that devours everything.
As the tides of three eras converge and reality and the historical record begin to consume each other, Chu Yan is forced to face the source of all the chaos, along with the ultimate choice:
Should he erase every change with his own hands and return everything to the starting point of “official history,” or accept this uncertain new world, shaped by both him and the Correctors?
