Westward, With No Return

In his first month after transmigrating to the Qin Dynasty, Chen Yan doesn't even have a knife.

He has only one sentence that can save his life: This thing of yours is going to collapse.

Chen Yan builds roads for a living.

He spent eleven years on construction sites, measuring walls, calculating angles, and seeing people buried in cave-ins. When he woke up, he was at Shaqiu, his mouth full of sand and a knife held to the bridge of his nose. A few soldiers were about to smash the "iron token" in his arms and sell it for scrap.

He said, "If you smash this piece of iron, this section of wall will collapse come autumn."

The soldiers didn't believe him. They went to check, and the wall really was leaning.

That night, he met a man in purple robes. The man's left sleeve was an inch longer than his right, and there was a knife hidden inside it. Chen Yan recited a passage from Records of the Grand Historian: In the seventh month of the thirty-seventh year of the First Emperor, on the day of Bingyin, he died at the Shaqiu Platform; Zhao Gao forged an imperial edict and ordered Fusu to die.

The man in purple asked, "How do you know that?"

He replied, "It's what I do for a living."

Later, he was taken to Shangjun. Standing before three hundred thousand people, he said one sentence that saved Fusu's life.

That sentence also meant he would never be able to return to Xianyang.