“So the true essence of the Zhan Guo Ce does not lie in the sophistry of diplomatic maneuvering, but in—”
The professor’s voice was like a rubber band stretched too far, buzzing through the classroom air as if it might snap at any moment.
Jiang Tuo sat along the edge of the third row from the back, his elbow propped on the desk as he absently toyed with a ballpoint pen missing its cap. His book was open to “Su Qin First Advocates the Horizontal Alliance,” but his gaze had long since drifted out the window.
Someone was playing soccer on the field. The sunlight was beautiful.
He lowered his head and glanced at the textbook—“Su Qin wore the seals of the six states and united them against Qin”—and a thought surfaced, the kind of thought that occurred to every Chinese literature student reading pre-Qin classics:
If I went back in time, I’d definitely be better than these people.
He almost laughed aloud.
It wasn’t arrogance. Well, maybe there was a little arrogance in it. But he had seriously thought about it.
Su Qin persuaded the six states with nothing but his tongue. Jiang Tuo had read two thousand more years’ worth of books than Su Qin. Su Qin understood only diplomatic maneuvering, while Jiang Tuo had studied every school of thought—the Confucianists, Daoists, Legalists, Mohists, the School of Names, military thought, Agriculturalist thought, and the School of Yin-Yang. He had even read later critiques and reflections on all of them. The essays Su Qin could recite, Jiang Tuo could not only recite—he could recite essays written a thousand years after Su Qin’s death.
The grand majesty of The Faults of Qin: “Drawing on the achievements of six generations, he brandished his long strategem and ruled within the realm…” The devotion unto death of The Memorial on Sending Out the Troops: “The late emperor’s enterprise was not yet halfway complete when he passed away midway…” The splendor of The Preface to the Pavilion of King Teng: “The falling clouds and solitary wild duck fly side by side; the autumn waters share the same color as the endless sky…” The warning of The Rhapsody on Efang Palace: “The garrison soldiers cried out, Hangu Pass fell, and the people of Chu set it ablaze—what remained was pitiful scorched earth…”
Any one of them, dropped into the relatively plain and still not especially rich vocabulary of the pre-Qin era, would have been enough to leave every writer in the Warring States period speechless. It would have been nothing short of a heavenly immortal descending to earth.
The more he thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed.
He really wasn’t any good at the sciences. He had barely passed high-school chemistry, physics, and biology. But ask him to make gunpowder? He wasn’t even sure what saltpeter looked like. A steam engine? Give him a break.
But the humanities—the humanities were where he truly excelled.
He knew the outcomes of every major battle. He knew the order in which each feudal state would fall and why. He knew when and how Qin Shi Huang would die, and what would happen after his death. He knew Zhao Gao would issue a forged imperial edict, that Fusu would commit suicide, and that Huhai would turn the whole realm into a complete mess.
He even knew that Xiang Yu would take his own life at the Wu River, and that Liu Bang would establish the Han dynasty.
What would people in that era call this?
Foreknowledge. Heaven’s chosen destiny. Or—
“Jiang Tuo?”
The professor’s voice suddenly sounded very close.
“Why don’t you tell us: after Su Qin failed with the horizontal alliance and turned to the vertical alliance, what was the core motivation behind that change?”
Jiang Tuo blinked and sat up straight. The entire class turned to look at him.
“Rank and recognition,” he said, with almost no hesitation. “Su Qin didn’t care whether it was the vertical alliance or the horizontal alliance. What he cared about was whether he could be given an important position. When the horizontal alliance led nowhere, he took another route. Strategy was the means. Rank and recognition were the goal.”
He paused, then added, “Actually, all the practitioners of diplomatic maneuvering were the same. They weren’t selling an ideology. They were selling themselves.”
The professor nodded, seemingly a little surprised by the answer. “Well said.”
Jiang Tuo leaned back into his chair.
Rank and recognition were the goal.
The words he had just spoken echoed in his mind.
The sunlight outside suddenly grew painfully bright. He instinctively narrowed his eyes and raised a hand to shield them—
And then the world shattered.
That wasn’t a metaphor.
The classroom, the desks and chairs, the ballpoint pen, the people playing soccer on the field, the textbook, the tablet—everything seemed to have its foundation yanked out from underneath it before collapsing with a crash. He felt himself falling, but not downward. He was falling toward somewhere without direction. The sound of rushing wind filled his ears.
He tried to shout, but when he opened his mouth, he breathed in dust.
Real dust.
Dry dust carrying the smell of burned grass and wood, scraping at his throat like sandpaper.
Jiang Tuo began coughing violently.
He was sprawled on the ground. Not the classroom floor, but hard-packed earth—hard enough to convince him he wasn’t dreaming. Sunlight poured straight down from overhead, its heat utterly different from the mild warmth outside the classroom window. This was the kind of merciless sun that could peel the skin off a person.
He pushed himself up and squinted around.
A dirt road. Low rammed-earth walls stood on either side, with withered yellow weeds growing along their tops. Smoke from cooking fires rose in the distance, and beyond that stretched a chain of rolling hills. The air smelled of livestock manure mixed with the scent of some unfamiliar grain being ground.
Someone passed along the road.
A man carrying a shoulder pole, dressed in a coarse hemp tunic and barefoot, his skin so dark it looked as if it had been painted on. He glanced at Jiang Tuo. There was no surprise in his eyes, only the indifferent acceptance of someone accustomed to seeing unfamiliar displaced wanderers. Then he continued on his way.
Jiang Tuo looked down at himself.
A white cotton T-shirt printed with English letters, dark blue jeans, and a pair of sneakers he had bought not long ago.
He hurriedly checked his pockets.
Empty.
No iPhone, no earbuds, no wallet, no student ID—nothing belonging to twenty-first-century industrial civilization. There was only himself and all the books stored inside his head.
He slowly got to his feet and brushed the dirt from his knees.
His heart was racing, but his mind was surprisingly clear. Maybe it was because he had imagined this scene so many times—while reading the Records of the Grand Historian, while reading the Zhan Guo Ce, in every boring class. If I ever really travel through time, what should I do?
Now, the “if” was gone.
He stood on a dirt road with no idea where it led, penniless and unable to speak the language—no, he should be able to speak the language. He had read enough pre-Qin texts. Historical phonology, phonetics, and so on… Classical Chinese wasn’t a foreign language to him.
More importantly, he needed to figure out three things as quickly as possible: First, what year was it? Second, what state was this? Third, where was the nearest city or market town?
He began walking along the dirt road toward the cooking smoke.
His sneakers made a dull scraping sound against the gravelly road. After walking for about a quarter of an hour, he saw a flag.
It was a tattered military flag planted in a mound of earth beside the road. The characters on it had been blurred by wind and rain, but he still recognized them.
Qin.
Jiang Tuo stood before the flag and stared at that character for a long time.
Then he laughed.
It wasn’t a bitter laugh or a frightened one. It was a laugh rising from deep in his chest, carrying a hint of danger.
Qin.
The two thousand years of historical knowledge in his head—on this land, every single character of it was gold.
He knew Qin would unify the realm. He knew what would happen after unification. He knew the victor and loser of every war, the fate of every commander, and the beginning and end of every political coup.
He even knew exactly what kind of talent this country needed most.
Jiang Tuo drew a deep breath and swallowed the dust-laden air.
All right.
First, stay alive. Then—
He remembered what he had said in class ten minutes earlier.
Rank and recognition were the goal.
He patted his pocket. Empty. He tapped his head. Full.
A third-year Chinese literature student, penniless, standing on Qin’s soil.
His only asset was everything he had read.
That was enough.
Jiang Tuo spun around. The confusion in his eyes had completely vanished, replaced by a light of absolute determination. He set off toward the distant Qin settlement where cooking smoke drifted into the air, a place filled with the unknown—and opportunity—taking one step after another.