A Nobody in All the World

Shen Huai, a PhD from the Academy of Social Sciences, opens his eyes to find himself a death-row convict on an execution ground in the northern reaches of the Great Zhang Dynasty. With a steel blade at his neck, he looks up at the snow filling the sky and laughs. For twenty-five years, he has studied every festering wound of this dynasty among piles of old books.

No System, no fantasy powers. Just five thousand years of human nature and political intrigue, and his ability to read the tides of history.

The day he crawls off the execution ground, he is a nobody without even a place on the military rolls. Yet the bloodthirsty warlords, the strategists who plot from behind the scenes, and the frontier soldiers who live by the blade all follow him, calling him “Sir.”

Later, people say: This realm belongs to Great Zhang, and to the heroes who contend for it, but in the end, it was won by a nobody leading his brothers.

Shen Huai himself says: “I only wanted to survive. They insisted on making me emperor.”

A commoner by birth, he plays the game of the world.