On New Year's Eve in 2026, freezing rain blankets Tengzhou.
Delivery rider Zhang Linyuan races through traffic, risking his life to earn his full-attendance bonus and save for a home, when a runaway Audi sends him hurtling into endless darkness.
When he opens his eyes again, there is no System, no golden finger, no halo of a transmigrator.
There is only the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, the final days of Southern Tang, and a fifteen-year-old tenant farmer's battered body amid the fires of war.
His name is Zhang Ergou. His family is destitute, his debts are piling up, and he is about to be forcibly conscripted as cannon fodder on a suicide mission.
Alone and helpless, he has just one thing to rely on: the Mohist Fist passed down by an old man when he was young.
It is not for picking fights or killing indiscriminately, but only for building strength, staying alive, and protecting the little peace in his heart.
From a defeated Southern Tang soldier to an auxiliary in Later Zhou, he claws his way out of a mountain of corpses and becomes a squad commander from the lowest ranks.
He witnesses villages massacred in the chaos, fields strewn with the dead, emperors rise and fall, and dynasties collapse.
When the Chenqiao Mutiny establishes the Northern Song, he neither curries favor with the powerful nor covets fame and rank. All he wants is “peace.”
After accomplishing his mission, he asks to retire and return to farming in Teng County, Yizhou.
With a plow in one hand and a book in the other, he transforms from a warrior into a farmer-scholar, raises talented children, and lifts his family into a new social station.
A dream of seventy years takes him from tenant farmer to a family of farmer-scholars, from a lonely soul to a patriarch surrounded by children and grandchildren.
When he opens his eyes again, the smell of disinfectant fills his nostrils. He is back in a modern hospital room.
He has been unconscious for only five days, but in his dream, a thousand years have passed.
The Mohist Fist remains, but his outlook has changed. His regrets have been put to rest, and his obsessions have faded.
In this life, he no longer struggles merely to survive. He lives because life is worth living.
No System, no golden finger, just realistic history.
From delivery rider to Northern Song farmer-scholar, a thousand years in a dream,
