In the first year of Zhongping, in the second month.
Chen Zhao opens his eyes to the taste of talisman water. He has become a seventeen-year-old novice preacher in Julu, with seventy refugees kneeling at his feet, waiting to die, and only half a bowl of undissolved salt in his hands.
Three months ago, he was working the night shift at a county hospital. Now he has to use a jar of salt water to convince these people he can keep them alive.
He knows what comes next.
He knows the uprising, originally set for the fifth day of the third month, has been moved up to the second month because Tang Zhou betrayed them.
He knows the Great Sage and Virtuous Teacher will die of illness in the army in the eighth month, Guangzong will fall in the ninth, and thirty thousand heads will be piled south of the city, higher than the walls.
He knows that Quyang will fall again in winter, and more than a hundred thousand people will be slaughtered beneath its walls, their blood soaking the earth into black mud.
Ten months. Not one of these seventy people will live to see next spring.
Others believe in talisman water. He does not.
Others burn talismans. He boils water.
He knows nothing about battle formations, cannot fight, and barely recognizes any Yellow Turban commanders. He has only one thing that no one else in this world possesses:
He has read the history books.
But from this moment on, history will be rewritten according to his will.
With every life he saves, the world branches onto a different path.
Ten months from now, he will either lead these people out of the mountain of corpses,
or become one of the bricks in a corpse monument alongside them.
