Shadow over the Sixteen Prefectures

 

He only wanted to go home.

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Instead, he woke up more than a thousand years in the past.

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Xiao Shitou—Stone to the people who know him later—is an ordinary man from modern China. He knows enough history to recognize that he has fallen into one of the most dangerous periods of Chinese history: the age of the Sixteen Prefectures, when the Liao, Jin, Song, Xia, and countless smaller powers fought over northern China.

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He also knows something else.

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History says these wars happened long before him.

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History says the people around him are already dead.

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History is wrong about a lot of things.

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Stone begins with almost nothing: no army, no throne, no system, and no convenient list of quests telling him what to do next. What he does have is a stubborn wife, a complicated past, a strange ability to survive situations that should have killed him, and an increasingly troublesome habit of becoming involved in other people's lives.

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He meets soldiers who should have disappeared from history, princes who will later become emperors, refugees who have nowhere to go, warriors who speak languages he has never heard, and children who will grow into men capable of changing the world.

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Sometimes he fights.

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Sometimes he runs.

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Sometimes he builds.

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Sometimes he simply tries to keep someone alive until morning.

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Along the way, Stone becomes entangled in wars between kingdoms and empires. He crosses mountains, deserts, battlefields, cities, prisons, forests, and eventually oceans. He encounters people from different times and different worlds, and slowly discovers that history is much less orderly when you are standing inside it.

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The Sixteen Prefectures become only the beginning.

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As the story expands, Stone's family is scattered across continents and generations. Old enemies become allies. Allies become strangers. Children grow up and make choices their parents cannot control. Some people chase kingdoms. Some chase freedom. Some chase revenge.

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And some simply want to find their mother.

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The further Stone travels, the less important his own legend becomes.

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There comes a time when other people begin to carry the story forward: his wife, his children, old friends, former enemies, and people who have inherited wounds from wars they never started.

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Stone discovers that saving someone does not mean owning their future.

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Loving someone does not mean keeping them.

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And returning home does not necessarily mean going back to the place where you started.

This is a story about war and wandering, family and separation, history and memory.

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It is also a story about ordinary things that survive enormous events: a meal shared after a battle, a horse waiting in the rain, a child asking for his mother, an old song remembered decades later, and people sitting together beside a grave.

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The story begins with a man falling into history.

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It ends with him discovering that history was never really what he was looking for.

He was looking for home.