Heroes of the Five Dynasties: Saving Zhao Kuangyin from the Start

Chen Huaizhou is a twenty-second-century temporal agent, call sign Observer Seven. A solar storm hurls him from a future of absolute reason into the year 948, where human lives are worth less than grass.

His mission was to record history. But when he sees the future Emperor Taizu of Song, Zhao Kuangyin, lying disemboweled beneath the hooves of the Khitan, he breaks the Prime Directive and saves a life that was never meant to end then, using nanobots. With a thousand years of knowledge in his left hand and the remnants of future technology in his right, Chen Huaizhou maneuvers among the ambitious warlords who are about to usher in a new age, including Guo Wei, Chai Rong, and Fu Yanching. He saves the Fu family's legitimate daughter, who was meant to become a political pawn, and begins a love affair amid the chaos with the future empress. He offers guidance to Zhao Kuangyin before the latter dons the imperial robes, unaware that he is rewriting the script of the Chenqiao Mutiny with his own hands.

History, however, has its own immune system. The Temporal Correctors pursue him relentlessly, warning that every intervention adds to a cataclysmic temporal turbulence.

On one side are conscience and emotion: he cannot stand by as countless lives are lost. On the other are the cold laws of time, warning that one more step could bring the entire future crashing down.

As Li Shouzhen's rebel cavalry storms across the Yellow River, as Khitan sabers once more point south, and as courtly conspiracies draw everyone into their vortex, Chen Huaizhou reaches a crossroads.

Will he remain a detached observer, watching history repeat itself in rivers of blood? Or will he draw the blade of the future, even if the price is... that the Song, which should have endured for three hundred years, never sees the light of day? This time, the one who ends the chaos is not a hero chosen by fate, but a "mistake" from the future.