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 releases on 17 May 2026 at 12:00 PM (SGT) exclusively on WebNovel.
He has studied the records. He knows the battles, the betrayals, the final verdict of history. What he is not prepared for is hunger.