The Tang Dynasty's Traitor: Starting with a Switcheroo at Mawei Slope

[Serious historical drama + no System + rogue warlord + ruthless and decisive + smart characters] [No sudden drops in intelligence, no hindsight heroics. Every victory has to balance the books on food, horses, and arms. A costly victory feels more real than a triumph.]

At the end of the Tianbao era, the Tang Empire lay shattered. The emperor was fleeing, the crown prince was usurping the throne, and the Hu were in revolt. Cheng Erlang, a captain in the imperial guards and a former street fighter from Chang’an’s Western Market, bent down and casually picked up the broken realm.

On the fourteenth day of the sixth month in the fifteenth year of Tianbao, at Mawei Station, the Right Chancellor was executed, his head hung high, the six armies demanded the emperor’s abdication, and the white silk was about to fall. In this shocking deadlock of regicide and the strangling of a concubine, Cheng Erlang first bowed and scraped before Chen Xuanli and Gao Lishi, wearing a fawning smile as he welcomed the emperor;

then, the very next moment, he drove the horizontal blade in his hand into the supply wagons of the Yang Chancellor’s residence.

Should he go to Shu to be a watchdog, or to Lingwu to serve as cannon fodder for the new emperor? Cheng Erlang chose neither. He held his saber in reverse and led his brothers back through the chaos of war into the occupied Guanzhong Plain.

He smiled as he welcomed his lord, then reached for his blade to bring down the Tang. He seized fortified estates, suppressed outlaws, and smuggled goods with rebel Hu generals. On the ruins no one wanted, he built a code of his own, fit for rogues. When the Tang emperor finally came to his senses and prepared to reward his loyalists, then dispose of them once they were no longer useful,

he discovered that the once-timid “traitor” in Guanzhong had already carved out an independent domain and become a colossal warlord capable of choking the Tang Empire to death.

“If you lot can’t hold on to the Tang realm, then I’ll just bend down and pick it up.”