Lü Yueguang is twenty-nine years old and works in a studio that turns historical figures into collectibles.
His latest assignment is a plastic statue of Lü Bu — the warlord, the traitor, the Three Kingdoms villain no serious scholar defends. The brief calls for a V-shaped chin, a golden crown, armour that catches the light. The factory renders the face in forty millimetres of resin. It ships in a box with the warlord’s name written in a typeface designed to look ancient.
Yueguang sets the statue on his desk and stares at it for a long time.
Then he falls asleep.
He wakes in Jiuyuan County, on the northern Han frontier, where the wind carries the smell of cold earth and woodsmoke and nothing else. The sky is the colour of unpolished iron. A young man crouches at the edge of a dried streambed, checking the ground for something to eat.
The young man is weathered. His hands are cracked. He moves carefully, the way people move when every motion costs something they cannot afford to spend.
He looks nothing like the statue.
He looks like someone who has not eaten in three days and has learned not to show it.
Chapter One of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is now live on WebNovel and Royal Road.
He has studied the records. He knows the battles, the betrayals, the final verdict of history. What he is not prepared for is hunger.
About this chapter
Chapter One asks what it costs to study history at a remove — to render a warlord into forty millimetres of licensed resin, to assign him a typeface designed to look ancient, and to ship him in a box with a name that has outlived everything else about him.
Lü Yueguang has built a career on this distance. The chapter removes it. He wakes in Jiuyuan County on the northern Han frontier, inhabiting a body that is hungry, careful, and built for survival in ways no studio brief has prepared him for. He knows this man’s historical record. He does not know his name.
The Weight of Plastic and Dust establishes the central mechanic of the novel: every time Yueguang sleeps in the modern world, he wakes in Han Dynasty China. The interval is six hours. The body he wakes in is never the one he left.
About Tales of Alive
Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is a historical novel by 吕恩豪, set between contemporary Shenzhen and Han Dynasty China. Book One follows a man trained to read the past who finds himself forced to live inside it. New chapters publish every Sunday on WebNovel and Royal Road. Every court session, every meal, every execution has a source. What the author cannot prove is marked clearly. The rest, they will stand behind.