No One Returns from Hexi

Winter, 382 AD, beyond the Yumen Pass.

Fu Jian sent Lu Guang west on an expedition with seventy thousand soldiers and five thousand armored cavalry. No one knew that by the time this army returned, the Central Plains would have fallen apart, leaving them with nowhere to go.

In the midst of a sandstorm, a squad leader commanding fifty men took on the memories of another person from sixteen hundred years in the future, along with a phone that could never be charged again.

He couldn't bring back the Wumu Manual, and he couldn't make gunpowder. He had only one thing

he knew where the water was.

Which dry riverbeds had underground seepage three feet down, which Han-era canals could still be used, when the snowmelt from the Qilian Mountains would come, and which route it would take.

In the Hexi Corridor, where annual rainfall was less than two hundred millimeters, this wasn't a golden finger. It was a matter of life and death.

Seventy thousand exhausted soldiers, without food or legitimacy. The governor of Liangzhou had shut his gates and refused them entry. Everyone expected him to attack Guzang.

Instead, he turned toward Zhangye. There was an old Han-era canal there, buried under sand for two hundred years. He knew it could be restored within three months.

After that year's autumn harvest, no one asked him why.

From squad leader to master of the Hexi Corridor, then to Guanzhong, and finally to the whole realm.

But what this book really wants to ask is not how far he can go.

He once saved a man who was supposed to die because of slander. That man survived, only to die seven years later in an ambush he had never anticipated.

History is not a piece of iron wire that can be bent. It is the Heihe River: block it upstream, and it will burst its banks somewhere else downstream.

The entries on his phone would grow hazy one by one. The last time he lit up the screen, the entry about himself was blank.

From then on, he walked in the dark like everyone else in the world.

This time, he would write it himself.