If I Already Restored the Kingdom, Why Was I Reborn?

Blurb:

From foreign slave to ruler who restored his kingdom, Qin Zhuo won the world, yet in the dead of night he could only dream of a face that would never appear again.

This time, the dream seemed to be lasting a little longer...

They say that when people are close to death, they revisit the past at any time, wherever they are.

Yet in the thirtieth year of Xiangguang, at just nineteen, Ninth Prince Qin Zhuo had already taken to reminiscing about the past in his dreams.

After enduring a sudden upheaval and fighting on the battlefield for fifteen years to restore his kingdom, the middle-aged Emperor Ruining, Qin Zhuo, grew ever more attached to his dreams. His chronic obsession with old memories only worsened.

Only the little ghost never came to find him.

The dreams that Qin Zhuo remembered most clearly fell into three kinds.

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The first kind took place before he was twelve, when he lived peacefully with his mother in Zhongning Pavilion. The Xuan people always called her Alan Nu.

The people around him often said things he couldn't understand. Every year, there were a few days when he had to leave Zhongning Pavilion and stand among strangers, feeling like a wolf dropped into a den of leopards. But he and his mother had only each other, and he had never felt that anything was lacking.

He once thought he and his mother could stay by each other's side forever, living simply and happily.

Then his mother suddenly passed away.

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The second kind took place when he was twelve to nineteen. He wandered the palace corridors in a daze until the Crown Prince, the second person in the world to stop for his suffering, took him in.

The Crown Prince had many younger brothers and was always forcing him to attend classes and literary gatherings. His punishments came in every imaginable form, and were terrifying. But Qin Zhuo believed he was different from the others. He alone lived in the Eastern Palace.

He once thought he would always be the Crown Prince's favorite younger brother, and that he would watch the Crown Prince ascend the throne, witness the Great Xuan Empire enjoy peace and prosperity, and see it enter a golden age.

In the end, the Crown Prince was unexpectedly exposed as not being the emperor's son and died in a sea of flames. The person the Crown Prince had trusted with his hopes and entrusted with a great responsibility before his death... was not Qin Zhuo. In a single night, the Khitan cavalry crushed Great Xuan, destroying his family and country.

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The third kind took place after he turned nineteen. Driven by resentment at being made a puppet, and by hatred he could not even tell whom it was directed at, he killed.

The mountains of corpses and rivers of blood on the battlefield drove him mad, while the treachery of politics sickened him. But only by pressing endlessly forward could Qin Zhuo stop himself from longing for the past, which could never be brought back.

He once thought he would end up like countless self-important fools, either dying in battle or meeting an untimely end.

Instead, he seized power, defeated his enemies, restored his kingdom, and ascended the throne.

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Now, all of a sudden, there was a fourth kind of dream.

It seemed he had returned from the fifth year of Ruining to the twenty-sixth year of Xiangguang.

*The blurb is as complete as I could make it.

*This is a fictional setting, a fictional setting, a fictional setting. Important things must be said three times.

*I'm a relentless proofreader. I probably won't make major revisions, but if I do, I'll mention it in the author's notes.

Theme: The road may be long and difficult, but keep walking and you will arrive.