Rebuilding the Realm

The despicable “puppet emperor” Shi Jingtang treated his enemies as his fathers, sold out his country for personal gain, and ceded the Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun to the Khitan, bringing four centuries of calamity. The northern strategic gateway was thrown wide open, leaving the Central Plains defenseless. The Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols, and other peoples used it as a bridgehead to invade the heartland, slaughtering countless people. Wherever their iron hooves passed, corpses piled like mountains and rivers ran red with blood. No calamity in all history had ever been so dreadful! The Song dynasty launched two northern campaigns to recover the Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun, but both ended in defeat, with heavy casualties and shattered armies. The famous general Yang Linggong died heroically in the Yongxi Northern Campaign! In the sixth year of Xiande, the brilliant Emperor Shizong of Later Zhou led a northern campaign and captured the Three Passes without a single battle. The Khitan were terrified and fled north in disarray. The recovery of the Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun seemed within reach, but Emperor Shizong unexpectedly died of illness. This chapter of history, which should have gone down in the annals, was cut short halfway through, leaving countless generations to sigh over it again and again! China was once more battered by turmoil. At this critical moment, Huang Jun unexpectedly arrives in this turbulent age. China is then a shattered land plagued by constant warfare: bones lie exposed in the wilderness, and for a thousand miles not a rooster crows. One person in a hundred survives. With Huang Jun shaping the course of events, where will Chinese history go? Will he continue Emperor Shizong’s unfinished northern campaign and fight the Khitan to reclaim the Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun, or will history repeat itself, with Zhao Kuangyin establishing the Song dynasty, weakened for a century?