The Dual-Phase Era

The first thing I did after waking up was discover that I had become Yan Shifan.

The second was discover that the memories of a Tang dynasty man lived inside my head.

The third was discover that people who had “woken up” were everywhere in this era.

The sixteenth year of Tianshun, the twelfth lunar month. The condemned prisoner Yan Shifan awoke in the imperial prison, a strange calm in his eyes. He was Li Linfu, chancellor of the Great Tang, or at least, that was what he believed.

But he soon realized he wasn’t the only one who was “not quite right.”

Hu Zongxian, governor-general of Zhejiang and Zhili, suddenly seemed able to predict the course of the war in the southeast far beyond what his era allowed. The hatred Vice Chancellor Xu Jie felt for the Yan family carried the weight of some old vendetta. Lü Fang, the chief eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial, marked places he had never visited on an old sea chart. Feng Bao, the director of the Eastern Depot, woke from the same nightmare every night: Coal Hill, a locust tree, and a king hanging himself.

And Emperor Jiajing, in his alchemy chamber at the Western Park, had already been waiting for them for thirty years.

This was a tumultuous struggle spanning time and space. A group of “strangers,” cast into the Ming dynasty by fate, brought the obsessions and prejudices of their past lives into battle within this corroded machine of power. Some wanted to save the nation from ruin, some to purge the court, some to reopen the sea routes, and some simply wanted to go home.

But they all forgot to ask the most important question: if every plank in a ship has been replaced, is it still the same ship?

When a person is repeatedly overwritten by different memories, are they still “themselves”?

And he had already forgotten the question itself for the third time.