The grain stores at Mengjin Port burned through the night. Ding Yuan’s men set the fire on purpose, and when it was done, Lü Yueguang lay in the mud and oil with something stuck in his neck. It was not an arrow or a splinter. It was a small metal dart with a needle tip and plastic vanes. Nothing like it should exist in 189 AD. He hid it inside his tunic, next to the burnt piece of wood he still carried, and stood up just as the horns called the army to march.
Beside him, Lü Bu sat on his horse and watched the winter food turn to ash. They burn our food, he said, just to send a signal to the palace. The men who would go hungry that winter meant nothing to the people giving orders. Now the northern columns have turned away from the river toward the high walls of Luoyang, and Lü Bu rides with them, angry and quiet.
Yueguang came to the past to watch history, not to change it. But the dart proves someone else from his own time is already here, and they did not come to watch. They came to take control. He does not know their name or their face, or where they are standing now.
The frontier is behind him. Ahead is the capital, where history is about to break.
Chapter Twenty-Four of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 opens Book Two and arrives Sunday, November 1.
The City of Rotten Silk
About this chapter
Chapter Twenty-Four opens Book Two, the Luoyang Tyranny. The northern frontier, with its cold, its hunger and its hard loyalties, falls away. In its place stands the Han capital in 189 AD, a city of palaces and fine silk, where the empire’s real decisions are made and broken. The chapter asks what power looks like from the bottom of the column, among the soldiers who march where they are told and pay for choices made far above them. It also asks who remembers the people that history leaves out. For Lü Yueguang, the past is no longer a record to study from a safe distance. It is a contest, and he is no longer sure who else is playing.
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. The series 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.
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- 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 Thirteen — The Awakening of the Beast
- Chapter Fourteen — The Madman’s Map
- Chapter Fifteen — The Slick and the Silent
- Chapter Sixteen — The Signal and the Ash
- Chapter Seventeen — The Shadow in the Terminal
- Chapter Eighteen — The Flight of the Fugitive
- Chapter Nineteen — The Mistaken Shadow
- Chapter Twenty — The Cleaner’s Key
- Chapter Twenty-One — The Hearth in the Northern Dust
- Chapter Twenty-Two — The Roots in the Shadows
- Chapter Twenty-Three — The Dart in the Smoke
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