Heavenly Calculations

Gu Chen never imagined his graduation thesis would become a death sentence.

The day he was studying Little Ice Age climate patterns on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, a glacier split open. When he woke up, he was lying in a corpse cart, surrounded by dozens of frozen refugee bodies.

He had transmigrated.

He had arrived at the end of a dynasty called Great Liang: years of drought, rampant plague, refugees everywhere, and tribes beyond the frontier poised to invade. It was just like the end of the Ming dynasty. Just like the eve of a dynasty’s collapse, which he had analyzed in his thesis.

And the most dangerous thing of all was in his head: science.

He could predict the weather, down to the day it would rain, the month frost would fall, and the year a great drought would strike. In an age when natural disasters were seen as Heaven’s will and drought as divine punishment, what did that mean?

It meant the emperor wanted to use him to prove that Heaven had chosen him, the Imperial Astronomical Bureau wanted him dead because he threatened the foundations of Heaven’s mandate, refugees saw him as their savior, and the powerful saw him as a thorn in their side.

He only wanted to save people.

But every step, from saving a village to saving a city to saving the world, brought him closer to the edge of a blade.

And every step brought him closer to the ultimate question:

Is Heaven’s mandate truly impossible to change?