In the fourth year of Tianyou, Zhu Wen deposed the Tang and declared himself emperor. The last surviving descendant of the Tang imperial house was poisoned in Bianzhou, then abandoned in a mass grave.
He awoke among the corpses. In his previous life, he had been a scholar who specialized in the history of the Five Dynasties and a retired soldier. In this life, he was a "dead man" secretly raised among the common people by Emperor Zhaozong, whose name did not appear in the imperial register. The world believed the Tang had been wiped out, but he alone knew what was coming: in a few decades, the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun would be ceded, an emperor in name only would kneel before foreign rulers, and the Han people would be driven south, their civilization plunged into three centuries of decline.
As a man who was already "dead," he would rekindle the embers of the Great Tang from the deepest darkness of a chaotic age.
From a mass grave to a desolate town in Hebei, from the trade routes of well salt to blood-soaked battlefields, he gathered loyal men, built an army, and restored the rightful order. Armed with modern military strategy and institutional thinking, he fought his way through the narrow gap between Zhu Liang, the Shatuo, and the Khitan. But the true enemy was never on the battlefield. It lay in the claim to legitimacy, in the hearts of the people, and in whether the name "Tang" still meant anything.
To continue the Tang was not to preserve the Li family's rule, but to uphold the spirit of Han civilization and keep it from falling into ruin.
He climbed on bones and planned for ten years. When the bells of Chang'an rang once more, he stood before the palace and looked back on the road he had traveled. He said only one thing:
"The Great Tang has returned."
Theme: To continue the Tang is not to preserve the Li family's rule, but to uphold the spirit of Han civilization and keep it from falling into ruin.
