His name was Li Ang, and he was a delivery guy.
Thirty years old, married, behind on rent, looked down on by his wife. He worked fifteen hours a day, switching between delivery platforms and running himself ragged. In the early hours of April 12, while delivering his last order of fried noodles, the high beams of a truck blinded him.
When he woke up, he was lying on a cracked wasteland. The sky was gray and sunless. His phone screen was shattered, and there was no signal. In the distance stood a scarecrow in a black robe, its sackcloth head sewn with a smiling face.
He thought he had transmigrated to Korea. Later, he realized his mistake: not the Republic of Korea, but the ancient Korean state among the Seven Warring States. Ying Zheng was king of Qin, the other six states had yet to fall, and after centuries of war, the land was soaked in blood and resentment.
Those things grew out of the blood.
Blightwood. Ghouls. In silent villages, the living still walked around, but they no longer spoke. Scarecrows turned their heads. The water in the wells was black. Something squirmed underground, waiting for the day it would break through the soil.
Li Ang only wanted to stay alive. He fled across the borderlands with three members of the Mohist school: A Wu, A Zhi, and Xiao Shitou. They told him this world was sick, and had been for a long time. Centuries of warfare had left too many dead. The fear and despair had accumulated across the land and refused to dissipate. They seeped into the soil and rivers, giving rise to things that should never have existed.
But that wasn’t the whole truth.
Ying Zheng built the Great Wall not to keep out the northern tribes, but to suppress something. The Nine Tripod Cauldrons weren’t ritual vessels. They were artifacts left behind in the human world by Nyarlathotep…
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