Summer, 2024.
After ten years of work, history PhD Chen Mo finally completes his thesis, An Examination of Qin Shi Huang’s Mental State, a paper that completely overturns the academic consensus. He argues that the First Emperor did not go mad in his final years, and that his death at Sand Dune conceals a startling secret.
On the day of his thesis defense, a meteor falls, and everything goes black.
When he opens his eyes again, he is lying in a stiflingly hot covered carriage. The stench of salted fish fills his nostrils, and Zhao Gao’s cold whisper reaches his ears: “Chancellor, His Majesty… is dead.”
Chen Mo looks down and sees a black imperial robe on his body. In his hand is an edict that has not yet been issued: an order for Fusu to commit suicide.
He has become Qin Shi Huang.
It is the seventh month of the thirty-seventh year of King Zheng of Qin, at Sand Dune.
No one knows that the body that has just “died” now houses a modern soul who knows Ying Zheng inside and out. Chen Mo understands at once: history has reached its most perilous crossroads. Zhao Gao and Li Si are plotting a coup, Hu Hai is waiting for his chance, Fusu is about to be falsely accused and driven to suicide, and the Great Qin has only one last breath left.
But Chen Mo smiles.
He is the person who understands Qin Shi Huang better than anyone in the world.
“Want to forge an imperial edict? Allow me to teach you what true imperial statecraft looks like.”
Starting at Sand Dune, he changes not just one man’s fate, but the course of an entire civilization.
Abolishing human sacrifices, freeing penal laborers, improving farming tools, introducing phonetic spelling, cultivating medicine, exploring the Western Regions: while the ministers think His Majesty’s brush with death has changed his personality, they are horrified to discover that this “resurrected” First Emperor is playing a game that will span two thousand years.
And the wheel of history turns with a thunderous roar beneath his hand.
