The Great Chinese Era has passed its golden age.
Warlords carve up the realm, eunuchs control the imperial palace, and border threats gather like sharpened blades.
A brilliant civilization is sliding irreversibly into the abyss.
Li Yan is a distant branch of the imperial family, exiled to Penglai and reduced to a petty county magistrate.
No one knows that the embittered magistrate's mind burns with the flame of a civilization from the future.
While others spend their lives poring over ancient texts, he improves farm tools, making waves of rice ripple across barren fields;
while court factions scheme against one another, he builds blast furnaces, replacing cold-forged weapons with rivers of steel;
while the imperial guards still indulge in pleasure, he develops the "Fire Dragon Arrow" and the "Nation-Defending Cannon," assembling a silent, deadly new army.
From salt drying and coke smelting to flying shuttles and steamships;
from a single county in Penglai to the land of Qilu, and then to the gates of Chang'an.
The aristocratic clans call him "a hen crowing at dawn, obsessed with strange inventions and petty tricks."
The eunuchs curse him as "a warlord gathering power and plotting rebellion."
The warlords fear him, saying his firearms are "so fearsome they seem demonic, almost divine."
He aims to do far more than change the ruling dynasty.
He will give this weary empire a backbone of steel and kindle the fires of industry, letting the light of reason dispel ignorance.
He will replace the mournful cries of camel bells with the roar of steam engines;
with new knowledge from the study of natural principles, he will reshape the order of the world.
It is a road no one has ever traveled.
The giants of the old era join forces to crush him, and enemies surround him on every side.
But Li Yan grips the blueprint of civilization in his hand, his gaze unwavering:
"Since the old body of the glorious Tang has rotted away, I shall forge it a new, immortal soul of steel."
❤️ The historical time travel novel I wrote is so beautiful!