On the bloody night Handan fell, librarian Xiao Ming snatched a gloomy young boy from an assassin's blade. When Ying Zheng bit his finger and wrote “We will never betray each other” in Xiao Ming's palm, who could have guessed that drop of blood would seep into the empire's fate for the next thirty years?
He taught the young emperor to conquer the Six Kingdoms with stirrups, gather the realm's finest talents at an academy, and weave a covert network spanning the land through the Black Ice Terrace. Han Xin rose from a palace guard at his desk to become General of the North. Zhang Liang came to his door as a youth bent on revenge and became a guest of the empire. He was Qin Shi Huang's elder brother, the Grand Tutor of Great Qin, the crown prince's mentor, and the hidden moon the history books dared not record.
Until Xu Fu offered him a cup of “immortal elixir” shimmering with an eerie blue light. The instant Xiao Ming tipped it back in court, he saw a flash of anguish in Ying Zheng's eyes. It turned out that the emperor had long since ceased to be the boy who bandaged his wounds in a ruined temple in Handan.
On the seventh day after his death, Great Qin's fleet set sail east, its ships blotting out the sea. Fifteen-year-old Crown Prince Fusu stood at the prow, holding Xiao Ming's memorial tablet, with five hundred thousand Qin soldiers behind him, sworn to avenge their Grand Tutor. In the deepest chamber of the tomb on Mount Li, the First Emperor stroked the empty coffin and whispered to the court historian, “Just write... The Emperor wept for his elder brother. I no longer seek immortality.”
From then on, the history books no longer recorded “Xu Fu's voyage east.” They recorded only “Great Qin's conquest of Wa.”
