Heroes of the Five Dynasties: Saving Zhao Kuangyin from the Start

Chen Huaizhou, a twenty-second-century temporal agent codenamed Observer Seven, is thrown by a solar storm from an utterly rational future into the year 948, where human lives are worth less than grass. His mission is to record history, but when he sees the future Song Emperor Taizu, Zhao Kuangyin, lying mortally wounded with his entrails spilling out beneath the hooves of the Khitan, he breaks the first rule and uses nanobots to save a life that was never meant to end. With a thousand years of knowledge in his left hand and the remnants of future technology in his right, Chen Huaizhou moves among the ambitious heroes who are about to usher in a new age, including Guo Wei, Chai Rong, and Fu Yanjing, under the name “overseas refugee.” He saves the Fu family’s legitimate daughter, who was meant to become a political pawn, and begins a romance amid the chaos with the woman destined to be empress. He also guides Zhao Kuangyin before he dons the imperial robes, unaware that he is rewriting the script of the Chenqiao Coup with his own hands.

Yet history has its own immune system. The “temporal correctors” pursue him relentlessly, warning that every intervention adds to a catastrophic temporal storm. On one side are conscience and compassion: he cannot stand by as people are slaughtered. On the other are the cold laws of time, warning that one more step could bring the entire future crashing down. When Li Shouzhen’s rebel cavalry storms across the Yellow River, when the Khitan sabers once again point south, and when court intrigue sweeps everyone into its vortex, Chen Huaizhou stands at a crossroads. Should he remain a calm observer and watch history repeat itself in rivers of blood? Or draw the blade of the future, even if the price is that the “Song,” which should have lasted three hundred years, never sees the light of day?

This time, the one who ends the chaos is not a hero chosen by fate, but an “error” from the future.