The Far Side of Time

Wang Bai, a history professor at Zhejiang University, is in a dusty storage room at the library with his girlfriend, and in the heat of passion they accidentally knock over an ancient bronze casket. The instant it opens, the “Time Shuttle” inside is activated by his blood, resonating strangely with the “Jade Seal of Wu Zetian” on display in the library. A blinding light swallows everything. He plunges into the freezing Taiye Pool and emerges as a bedraggled “man fallen from the sky” before Empress Wu Zetian in the first year of the Tianshou era of the Wu Zhou dynasty. With a modern mind and quick wits, Wang Bai astonishes Luoyang as a “Poet Immortal.” His magnificent, unconventional poetry shakes the literary world, but it also draws inscrutable attention. Behind the empress’s curiosity and dependence lies a pathological desire for immortality. The ethereal Daoist master Xu Fu needs Wang Bai’s “special” blood as a catalyst for his elixirs, and the ingredients in his formula come from the same material as the “Time Shuttle” that brought Wang Bai here. The talented Shangguan Wan’er helps conceal his phone from the future, but wariness and a hint of understanding linger in her eyes. Princess Taiping’s offer to recruit him is as sickly sweet as poison. Wang Bai soon realizes that he is no accidental visitor. His blood is the key; the Time Shuttle is the beacon; the empress is the anchor. A plot to attain immortality, spanning a thousand years, has long been laid out, and he is the chosen piece on the board. Amid grand poetic gatherings and the sultry undercurrents of court intrigue, he must use his peerless poetic talent as a shield and his modern historical insight as a blade to survive between the five powers of Wu Zetian, Xu Fu, Wan’er, Princess Taiping, and Di Renjie. He must solve the mystery of the Time Shuttle and uncover the bloody truth behind the “elixir of immortality.” Either he becomes a mere ingredient beneath the noose of history, or he tears open space and time and fights his way to freedom!