Great Tang: From the Start, I Turned to the Page of My Death

In the first month of the fifth year of Kaicheng, Lu Chi sat beneath the corridor all night. When he awoke, he had become a prince in the Sixteen Residences, one who knew nothing but hunting. A line of text floated before him: “Third month of the sixth year of Huichang: The emperor dies at the age of thirty-three.” That was “his” date of death. At this moment, his elder brother, the emperor, was still lying in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, while eunuchs had already brought the Shence Army to take him to Shaoyang Palace, where the crown prince once lived. He recognized everyone in the realm: all twenty-seven years of memories remained intact. But though he knew their offices, family ties, and temperaments, he knew nothing of how any of them would end up. Ninety years had passed since the An-Shi Rebellion. The military governors ruled independently, the eunuchs commanded the Shence Army, and the emperor’s fate rested entirely on their whim. He had brought along a strange book. Each page recorded one person’s fate, and the ink was sometimes wet, sometimes dry. On the page bearing his name, the ink was still wet. He could turn only three pages a day. Wet ink could be changed, but every page he changed came at a price. So he began doing something history had never recorded: keeping accounts. He counted military provisions, households, and public sentiment, calculating whether a dynasty with only six years left could still turn things around. From the third month of the sixth year of Huichang onward, the history books were blank. He would write that blank stretch himself.