At 2:17 a.m. on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month in the Jiachen year, 2026.
Wen Chao stared at his phone screen, his eyes bloodshot. Its blue light fell across his fourteen-year-old face, lending it an eerie pallor.
He couldn’t care less about his final exams in three days. What had him utterly hooked was a terrible online novel called The God-Tier Life of Reborn Li Shimin.
“What kind of nonsense is this?” he complained to himself for the 108th time. “The Prince of Qin has to soak in a spirit spring before court every day? Whenever Wei Zheng comes to remonstrate, he pulls out a System reward, a Shut Up Talisman? Did the author write this with their feet?”
But he couldn’t stop reading.
It was like knowing instant noodles were unhealthy, yet still squeezing every last drop out of the seasoning packet when you made them.
At two in the morning, his brain had long since stopped working, but his eyes were glued to the screen as if with superglue.
“Chapter Eighteen: The Xuanwu Gate Incident. Li Shimin takes on a hundred men alone…”
Wen Chao rolled his eyes. “One against a hundred? Come on, are you harvesting people like chives? The history books say it clearly: during the Xuanwu Gate Incident, after Li Shimin shot the crown prince, he was knocked down by a branch, and Li Yuanji strangled him with a bowstring… Ow!”
