The Tang Dynasty's Endgame

A note about this book: No childish writing, no padding, no botched ending. Its words are grounded in research and its references are well sourced. This is a wuxia novel steeped in culture.

After Buddhism was introduced to China during the Han dynasty, Daoism arose in Sichuan and Shaanxi, and Confucianism began to take shape, the many schools of thought from the pre-Qin era gradually declined. By the Tang dynasty, they had all but disappeared, with only a handful of their successors left. The glory of those schools, once dominant in the jianghu and famed throughout the land, had long since been swept away by the passage of time. In their place, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism flourished. Over the next eight hundred years, various martial arts schools arose from them. Together, they came to be known as the "martial world" and began to shape the jianghu.

Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao raised their banners in rebellion, plunging the realm into turmoil far worse than the An Lushan Rebellion. The jianghu was rife with upheaval. The Greenwood faction, which had known both periods of strength and decline, refused to remain dormant amid the endless wars of the late Tang and quietly rose again, seeking to challenge the martial world. At the same time, successors of the long-silent schools of thought, gone for nearly a thousand years, finally returned to the jianghu. Rebel armies and imperial forces, the Greenwood and the martial world, the schools of thought and wandering heroes, physicians, diviners, astrologers, and others all put their skills to the test, vying for control of the Central Plains.

Yet all of this was merely a scheme devised by someone.