She had come at him with a poison needle, and he had answered the only way the moment left open to him. Wei Měng’s body carried the weight of it as he swung back into the saddle — the conspiracy she’d named still unproven, the river incident still buried, and now a woman’s death added to a ledger he never meant to open. He rode for the army marching on Luoyang because it was the only direction left that wasn’t standing still.
He had come here to read history, not to make it.
Somewhere behind him, in a body he hadn’t touched in what felt like a lifetime, twelve years of caution were still waiting for a man who might not come back the same. He did not know yet what the ancient world would ask of him next, or what it would cost him to keep answering.
What does a man become, the longer he keeps choosing to survive?
Chapter Thirteen of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is now live on WebNovel and Royal Road.
The Awakening of the Beast
About this chapter
Chapter Thirteen follows Lü Yueguang deeper into a world that no longer lets him stay a witness. The Awakening of the Beast is a chapter about the line between studying violence and becoming it — the distance a careful man closes without meaning to, one choice at a time. It asks what is left of the historian once the history starts happening to him.
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.
Continue reading
- Chapter One — The Weight of Plastic and Dust
- Chapter Two — The Vessel of Wrath
- Chapter Three — The Weight of the Bargain
- Chapter Four — The Echo of the Breaking
- Chapter Five — The Bureaucrat’s Halberd
- Chapter Six — The Long March
- Chapter Seven — The River of Rot
- Chapter Eight — The Shards of Home
- Chapter Nine — The Ghost in the Glass
- Chapter Ten — The Dangerous Bargain
- Chapter Eleven — The Shadow on the Road
- Chapter Twelve — The Ink and the Ache
- Chapter Fourteen — The Madman’s Map
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