The Lock in the Earth

The northern army reached Luoyang hungry and cold, while Ding Yuan rode ahead in new crimson silk. Then the western sky went dark, and Dong Zhuo’s black-armoured host came out of the hills under a red banner. As the two armies faced each other on the frozen plain, Lü Yueguang looked up at the watchtower above the gate. A figure dressed like a scholar stood in the shadows, lifting a pair of binoculars, turning the lenses until they settled on his face.

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Then the past let him go. He woke in a small room that smelled of pipe tobacco and old books, where an old man knelt in tears and said the words no one should be able to say: You are not Wei Měng. That night he led Yueguang out past the edge of town to a flat stone under an elm, two crude characters cut into it. A clothes tomb. A family that had kept watch over it for seventy generations, waiting.

So now two people know. A stranger in 189 AD has seen his face across the years, and a family in the present has seen through the soldier he carries. One of them has waited centuries for this moment. The other may have been waiting for him all along.

He came to find a name in history. Now history has found his.

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Chapter Twenty-Five of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 arrives Sunday, November 8.

The Lock in the Earth

About this chapter

Chapter Twenty-Five stays with the question Book Two has just opened: what does it cost to be remembered? In the capital, power is gathering in the hands of men who never count the soldiers they spend. In the present, a single family has spent seventy generations remembering one of those soldiers when no record would. The chapter weighs those two kinds of memory against each other, the history written by the powerful and the history kept quietly by the people left behind. For Lü Yueguang, being a careful witness is no longer enough. Someone across the centuries already knows his face, and the past is starting to ask for more than his attention.

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
• Chapter Twenty-Four — The City of Rotten Silk