The Sky Screen Opens, and Every Emperor Loses It

Lu Xingzhou is thirty, unemployed, and working as a video editor. His rent is due, and his bank balance is down to double digits. On the night he gets laid off, a prompt appears on his old computer: “Sky Screen System binding complete. Your first video will be shown across every dynasty of Huaxia.”

Thinking it's a virus, he casually edits a video called “Three Things the First Emperor Feared Being Reminded Of.” But once it's released, a giant screen splits open above the Qin palace, and everyone at court in Xianyang looks up. Emperors from different eras, including Emperor Wu of Han, Emperor Taizong of Tang, Emperor Taizu of Song, and Emperor Taizu of Ming, see the same footage before their own palaces.

Lu Xingzhou soon discovers that the System gives him no money and no soldiers, only a “historical editing console.” The more accurately he edits, the stronger the emperors' emotional reactions, and the greater his rewards. The ancients can also send gold, silver, jade, books, and fragments of secret edicts through the sky screen. And so, a lowly modern video editor begins to seize control of the narrative across the dynasties by exposing emperors' scandals.

But as he keeps editing, he discovers that the sky screen isn't simply showing history. Every broadcast forces an emperor to face old debts, while pushing a deliberately concealed truth about a dynasty right in front of him.