Modern-day scholar Li Chengfeng unexpectedly transmigrates to the nineteenth year of the Zhenguan era, a critical moment when Emperor Taizong of Tang, Li Shimin, is leading a personal campaign against Goguryeo. Drawing on his deep academic knowledge of this period, he gains an audience with the emperor by “reading the heavens and offering extraordinary strategies,” then embarks on a journey to reshape the fate of the Great Tang with the wisdom of a thousand years to come.
From a scheme to cut off the water supply at Ansi Fortress to a siege without assault at Liaodong City, from concrete roads, glass mirrors, and finely forged steel to steam engines, railways, and cannons, Li Chengfeng uses both the Directorate of Imperial Manufactories and his scientific institute to plant the seeds of an Industrial Revolution on Chinese soil a thousand years early. His gift for invention makes him famous throughout the realm. Concrete paves the empire's roads, steel forms an unbreakable battle line, and steam power thunders across the land. Yet currents swirl beneath the imperial court. The Guanlong aristocratic clans see him as a thorn in their side, the struggle for the throne between the Crown Prince and Prince of Wei drags him into its whirlpool, and even Changsun Wuji, foremost among the heroes of the Lingyan Pavilion, contends with him openly and in secret. Facing repeated impeachments, assassinations, and technological theft, Li Chengfeng steadfastly follows the path of a lone minister: “I take no sides. I get things done.” When an army of three hundred thousand Tibetan troops advances on the border, he lays railways, casts cannons, and trains a new army, using the power of industrial civilization to win a decisive victory beneath the walls of Lanzhou and change the rules of war.
This is a story of knowledge and power, innovation and conservatism, and ideals and reality, all colliding fiercely. Can one person's hands turn back a tragedy a thousand years in the making? As the steam engine roars across the Great Tang, the course of history changes forever.
