He fell through time from two thousand years in the future. When he woke, iron chains had worn through the skin on his wrists, and his back bore twenty lash marks.
The jailer told him: “Tomorrow at the hour of the rabbit, at the sacrificial altar. You’ll be offered as a sacrifice.”
Lin Yan, a master’s graduate in history, transmigrated into the body of the least favored hostage prince of the Yong Kingdom. Yong cavalry had breached the borders of the Liang Kingdom, enraging its court. They wanted to sacrifice him to their battle flags. His biological father, the ruler of Yong, had only this to say: “If he dies, then he dies. He must not bring dishonor upon Yong.”
No one was coming to save him. He was a discarded pawn.
But in the darkness of the dungeon, Lin Yan found his one chance to survive: the struggle for the heir’s position between the Liang Crown Prince and the Second Prince. With a single sentence, he turned a dead end around, going from sacrificial offering to pawn, then from pawn to player.
He recruited a physician, took in a fierce general, and won over a strategist. He moved cautiously, step by step, in the narrow space between the seven kingdoms.
His fiefdom in Longxi was the starting point of his rise. He introduced land reclamation, iron smelting, and military training, using modern knowledge to overwhelm the competition and turn the poorest fief into a mighty cavalry force. In the battle on the northern frontier, he defeated fifty thousand with ten thousand and won a kingdom in a single battle. He quelled a bloody coup in Yong’s capital and ascended the throne. Heading east to vie for supremacy, he swept across the six kingdoms and united the realm.
But someone else had come to this world before him. That person had left a stone tablet on the Xianyang plain: “To those who come after me: I failed. I hope you can succeed.”
That person was Wang Mang. This is a conversation between two transmigrators across a thousand years.
From dungeon to throne, from sacrificial offering to emperor. In ten years, he laid out a game of strategy. His opponents were not the six kingdoms, but the human heart.
