Li Yan, a ruler condemned by the history books as foolish and inept, “got his wish” and died on a snowy night when powerful ministers forced their way into his palace. When he opened his eyes again, he was a comatose patient in a twenty-first-century hospital who had been in a vegetative state for three years. Stripped of his throne and left penniless, he was forced to take the full brunt of modern society: delivery customers yelled until he cried, and an expert mocked the “family heirloom” he tried to sell as a fake. His dignity lay in pieces. Then a history professor told him, “The suffering you see in your eyes doesn’t belong to this era.” From then on, the fallen dragon bowed his head and began to learn. He grasped the nature of power in an open-plan office, learned to read people on his delivery routes, used game theory to make sense of office politics, and planned his life with performance review forms. Just as he finally transformed himself, fate turned once more: he fell into a coma after a car accident in the modern world, then jolted awake inside an ancient coffin.
In court, the Empress Dowager ruled from behind the curtain, and powerful ministers held sway, treating him like a puppet who had already died once. He smiled faintly. What slipped from his sleeve was no longer a toy, but “Ten Strategies for Waterworks,” planned with a Gantt chart; a fiscal web woven with statistics; and a loyal inner circle forged through modern organizational science. “My esteemed ministers,” the reborn emperor said calmly, surveying the court, “I learned a few new things down below. Now, let’s begin a lesson.” The subject: how power really works.
