After Fabricating a Family Tree, I Became the Power Behind the Scenes in the Republic of China

After transmigrating to 1916, Zhang Yan became the sickly head of a declining family in Shandong. The ancestral hall leaked when it rained, creditors were at the door, and despair filled the eyes of the twenty households in his clan.

At the brink of ruin, he bound himself to a strange genealogy. Whenever he invented something about an ancestor’s past, it could become a real talent in the present.

With trembling hands, he wrote his first entry: “An ancestor once served as an imperial bodyguard. His legacy still lives on.”

His honest, sturdy cousin immediately gained the strength to lift a cauldron and drove off the family’s vicious servants.

No food to eat? Then he’d make up a “family tradition of imperial cooking,” and their street-food stall became the talk of the county.

Bandits on the attack? He’d invent an ancestor skilled in the mystic arts, and their mountain village would become impregnable.

He made up the family history for one reason: to keep his clan alive.

Then blood-red writing appeared in the genealogy: “Three days from now, your cousin will die.”

Zhang Yan suddenly realized that he wasn’t merely inventing the past. He was writing the future of an entire family, a future woven with blood and fire.

From a mountain village to Tianjin and Shanghai, from the flames of war to the undercurrents of the Cold War, the genealogy in his hands quietly sent its branches and tendrils across the world.

Years later, when family representatives scattered around the globe reunited with jade pendants in hand, they finally understood: the clan head who had spun stories in a dilapidated ancestral hall had woven a network of protection for Huaxia, one that spanned a hundred years.

“I open the genealogy not to record history, but to write the future.”