(He stared at it for a long time before setting the phone back on the table.
“This edict is forged,” he said.
Zhou Ye didn’t answer. The text on the screen already made clear that Zhao Gao and Li Si had forged the edict.
“Meng Tian must have urged him to verify it.”
Zhou Ye said quietly, “He did.”
Ying Zheng’s hand froze on the edge of the table.
“Fusu didn’t listen?”
“He said, ‘If a father grants his son death, what more is there to ask?’”
The rain fell outside for a long time.
In the end, Ying Zheng said only, “I taught him that.”)
Forty-nine days later, the North Gate opened.
In 210 BCE, during his final tour of inspection, Ying Zheng followed Xu Fu into a mountain palace absent from the historical records. He had thought it would be no more than a forty-nine-day slumber.
When he opened his eyes again, no one was outside the North Gate. The lamp oil had run dry, his robes had rotted, and roots had pierced the stone walls.
Deep in the mountains of Guizhou, more than two thousand years later, thirteen-year-old Zhou Ye met a stranger who couldn’t understand Mandarin, had no known identity or origins, and insisted his name was Zhao Zheng.
From learning the language of modern people to traveling the land again as an ordinary man; from the eternal emperor and tyrant of the history books to witnessing firsthand the achievements left by unification, the suffering caused by forced labor, and the fate of Great Qin, which fell after fifteen years.
He had once made the world obey the will of one man.
Now he had to learn to live in a world shared by everyone.
This is not a story about an emperor reclaiming the world. It is about a man who lost the world learning to acknowledge what he did, bear responsibility, and finally find his place among ordinary people.
