Three Kingdoms: I Am Hua Xiong, and I Kill Guan Yu from the Start

Hua Xiong, a modern-day thug, transmigrated into the past and became the Hua Xiong who was about to be cleaved in two by Guan Yu outside Hulao Pass. The good news was that he’d bound himself to a System. The bad news was that his combat stats had taken a twenty percent hit, and his very first mission was to kill Pan Feng. Failure meant instant erasure.

Fight fair and square? Not a chance. He blinded Pan Feng with lime powder, shot his horse with a sleeve arrow, then stabbed him three times in the armpit. Pan Feng died a thoroughly aggrieved death. The System’s reward: bad breath, a skill that lowered the enemy’s combat stats by fifteen percent whenever he spoke.

Guan Yu arrived. Ninety-seven points of combat power against Hua Xiong’s seventy-three. Hua Xiong blinded the God of War with burning oil, trapped him in a steel-wire net, and hemmed him in with iron caltrops until he was covered in blood. The allied forces called Hua Xiong despicable, while the Xiliang soldiers thought he was an embarrassment. The more they cursed him, the better his rewards. He dumped a hundred pounds of laxatives upstream in the Si River, giving all one hundred thousand allied soldiers diarrhea at the same time. The Three Heroes’ fight against Lü Bu became the Three Heroes’ struggle to hold it in.

Disguised as Yuan Shao, he slaughtered Cao Cao’s entire household. Dressed as Cao Cao, he raided Yuan Shao’s granaries. Wearing Sun Jian’s face, he tricked Sun Jian’s officers and killed them. He used knockout smoke to take Gongsun Zan’s camp, then tossed the Imperial Seal beneath the walls of Shouchun. The eighteen warlords slaughtered one another until the whole place was a mess. The area within a hundred paces of the Imperial Seal became a no-go zone: anyone who charged in died. And the man who had put the seal there crouched in a willow grove, watching them fight over it.

That was Hua Xiong. A thug had only one way to live: stay alive. How he did it didn’t matter.