The thing quantum physics PhD Lin Zhiqiu regretted most was not buying insurance for the laboratory.
The collider exploded, and he woke up as the Su family’s cast-off live-in son-in-law. With a divorce letter in his pocket, a mangy dog at his side, three hundred taels in bad debt on his back, and a hot fragment embedded in his palm, he was ready to start over.
Su Wan smacked the divorce letter into his face as the whole hall burst into laughter. Lin Zhiqiu grinned. “It’s only three hundred taels. In six months, I’ll pay it back with interest and smack it into your face. Don’t come crying and beg me to return.”
He headed north, determined never to take a loss. When bandits crossed his path, he talked them into a daze and casually swindled a bronze token from a woman in a yellow skirt. The name on it: Shen Hantang.
Commander of the Northern Frontier Army, a cold-faced executioner. No one in the army dared so much as look at her for long. Except Lin Zhiqiu.
“General, you look beautiful when you kick people.”
“Shen Hantang, if you charge into battle alone again, I’ll blow up the armory.”
Deputy General Lu Qingya laughed at their first meeting. “How’d you know I’ve been getting kicked around for eight years?” From then on, the two became partners in crime, modifying crossbows and arrows and reforming the mess hall, stirring up chaos throughout the camp.
In the capital, Empress Zhou Mubai had been haunted by the same strange dream for three years. When her hidden guards reported that a peculiar man had appeared in the north, she picked up her brush and wrote: Lin Zhiqiu.
Yunniang, the top courtesan at the Yihong House, was stunned by his pirated take on “Moonlight Before My Bed.” From then on, she gladly became his intelligence chief.
From cast-off son-in-law to Marquis An Guo, with a cold-faced female general at his left and the lofty empress at his right, while keeping the intelligence chief in line too. Caifa sprawled at his feet.
The fragment in his palm heated up for the last time. Experiment completion: 100%.
Lin Zhiqiu clapped his hands. “This rundown place called Great Zhou is much easier to get by in than a laboratory. At least I don’t have to make PowerPoint slides.”
