Chapter Text
Let’s skip to the important part: I arrived before the outbreak of the Sunshot Campaign. It took me about a month to figure this out, and that’s after I started keeping track of the days. There was a period there, right at the beginning, that I can’t quite account for. You know the drill: I died, dying is upsetting, showing up in a strange new world is also upsetting, discovering that the strange new world is the setting of a very familiar fictional story is hard to process in a way that I’d be tempted to call unbelievable.
I didn’t believe it, for a while. I couldn’t. But eventually the daily grind wears you down. No phones, no cash registers, no glass, no asphalt, no concrete, no televisions, no satellite dishes, no skyscrapers, no plumbing, no air conditioning, no credit cards, no ATMs. At some point, the panicking ends. The mind adapts whether you want it to or not. The old normal begins to seem strange; the new normal takes over.
I arrived in Yiling, which—in retrospect—seems awfully on the nose. So many turning points in the saga take place in the Burial Mounds, or in the shadow of them. I showed up very much as myself, no convenient golden core to catapult me into cultivator society, but with a few unexpected perks that I learned to appreciate: I spoke the language and, what’s more, I spoke the way I’d spoken in my old life, like an educated person. I could read and write. Literacy was rare enough in Xianxia-land that I could survive on it without any additional expertise. People would pay me a few bronze coins to scribe letters for them, and with a bit of hustling I earned enough to pay for the basics: food, a roof over my head, a set of used-but-not-too-worn robes.
I promise not to backtrack through the boring stuff too much, but I’d been on vacation when I died. I’d spent five whole years saving up for this epic three-month-long trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, dreaming about long days of staring out the window of my private compartment while the wheels clacked rhythmically against the tracks, punctuated by fun excursions into the world beyond. (Because I know someone is curious: I died on one of these fun excursions, in a rockslide. Like, two weeks in. I still feel cheated.)
Anyhow, preparing for this trip had been my chief pleasure for months before I actually left, and I transmigrated along with everything I’d been carrying when I died. So I arrived with a whole backpack full of useful stuff, including a fancy solar charger for my phone. I’d bought it in case of brownouts, which had seemed practical when browsing the shelves at my favorite adventure equipment store but in practice, the train had plenty of outlets.
It could be slow to charge up, but it did work. And even without service or search engines, a phone is pretty useful. The pedometer still functioned, for example, and with the aid of a little keychain compass I could make maps.
Really accurate maps.
Really accurate maps are pretty valuable in ancient fantasy China.
Once I got the hang of scribing for coins I started offering courier service, as well. There were no highways, few paved roads outside of cities. It’s hard to get around when you can’t reliably measure distance or direction, let alone check your hunches against a highly-engineered system of road signs. But once I’d mapped out an area, I could get around quickly and reliably. Over time, as I made more maps, my range increased. I could charge more for longer trips, and I made an okay living.
Of course I still had to watch out for bandits. And fierce corpses. And supernatural beasts. It wasn’t exactly the safest way to earn money, but it did expose me to a lot of gossip. I spent most of my evenings in various inns, having dinner, drinking tea while I transferred increasingly-detailed maps into the dot-grid notebook that had transmigrated with me, and just generally soaking up the atmosphere.
So I heard about it when the Wen Chao or Wen Xu swept through the stronghold of a minor sect and left only ruins behind. I heard about the proliferation of Supervisory Offices, and the burning of Cloud Recesses.
The burning of Cloud Recesses gave me a pretty good idea of where I’d arrived in the saga’s timeline. I knew what was coming, I wanted to help, but how? I was an underpowered nobody with no connections, no way to bend the ear of someone with enough influence to change the course of history.
So what could I do? All alone with my foreknowledge and my backpack full of tricks, how could I make a difference? I thought, and I thought, and I settled on an answer. A scary answer, with a high chance of failure, but worth the risk.
I could kill Wen Zhuliu.