Synopsis of The Green Has Yet to Begin
Su Wan is a physics graduate student at a university, specializing in quantum entanglement. Her side job is running data for her advisor. All she knows about the Tang dynasty comes from a classical Chinese reading question on a general education exam: an excerpt from Han Yu’s Afterword to the Biography of Zhang Zhongcheng. She only remembered four words: “kill a concubine to feed the soldiers.” She forgot them as soon as the exam was over.
Then she transmigrated.
When she woke, she had become Zhang Xun’s newlywed wife.
Who was Zhang Xun? She thought hard. He was the Tang dynasty man who defended Suiyang and was killed when the city fell. What year did he die? How long did he hold out? What were the names of the people who defended the city with him? She had no idea. The only thing she knew for sure was that she couldn’t stay in this doomed era. She didn’t love Zhang Xun. She just wanted to survive, then find a way home.
But things started going off course from the very first day.
She thought Zhang Xun was a cold-blooded murderer. But on their wedding night, he came through the door carrying a bowl of hot soup noodles and said, “Are you hungry? My mother said the bride hasn’t eaten all day.”
She thought everyone in the Tang dynasty was old-fashioned. But when she secretly clipped her nails, Zhang Xun saw and said nothing. He simply clipped his own long nails too, then said, “If my wife doesn’t keep her nails long, neither will I.” Su Wan nearly choked. Was that a cheesy pickup line, or did he really mean it?
She tried to use physics to calculate Zhang Xun’s chances of survival. She secretly filled a cloth pouch with route maps, supply calculations, and timelines for the siege. Then she discovered that Zhang Xun was terrible at math. She taught him division with counting rods, but he got confused by the third digit, pushed the rods aside, and said solemnly, “My wife, I have devoted myself to governing the city. I’ll leave the arithmetic to you.”
