Prologue: The Son of a Late Han Thousand-Gold Magnate
I had loved the Romance of the Three Kingdoms since I was a child, and I had devoured every work that touched it. Growing older changed nothing. That old fervor never left me, and I was forever hunting down anything connected to it.
So that night as well, unable to sleep on a business trip, I put on a famous YouTuber's channel — The Man Who Reads the Three Kingdoms — and watched deep into the small hours. Falling asleep was the last thing I remembered.
"...How in the world am I supposed to take this?"
I had fallen straight into the age of the Three Kingdoms.
I must have possessed the body of a man fated to die in this era. The physicians crowding around me had been going on about some wretched illness or other, summoning every renowned Daoist and doctor in the region, fussing with this remedy and that — and then I woke.
For a week after that I fainted and came to, again and again, while the knowledge of this age was shoved into me by force. Only then did I finally manage to stay awake, and I resolved to move.
The year was the fourth of Chuping — 193 by the Western calendar, an age of chaos. This place was Bohai Commandery in Jizhou, under Hebei, and the body I now wore belonged to the only son of a magnate possessed of staggering wealth.
"Young master, have you come down to the shore again today?"
Even through the days after I woke, when I couldn't adapt and thrashed like a madman, he had quietly helped me. He was a steward they called Ak.
"Too much on my mind..."
I had decided to grasp the situation as quickly as I could, and adapt. In my previous life I had been a man who ran a business under my father, commanding people just like these. The thought that from here on I would live this tale in the flesh — and shape it with my own hands — caught fire in me.
"Young master, forgive me for presuming to speak, but the master has sent another letter."
"Father? What does it say?"
"He says there is little time, and that he wishes the young master to uncover the answer to the problem as swiftly as possible. Young master, it truly is pressing."
Memories of the past were surfacing in scattered fragments. At the very least, the writing of this age had come back to me, and so had the people I remembered. I understood now why I was lingering here, on this stretch of Bohai coast with its fine views of the sea. It was my magnate father's test.
"I mean to go looking for it, starting now."
"Then I shall remain at your side and attend you, young master!"
I walked along the shore, looking out over a sea of astonishing clarity, and my thoughts ran deep. My father, they said, had piled up thousands of gold pieces through countless ventures across Hebei, and he had served as patron to a great many warlords besides.
Among them, during the Yellow Turban Rebellion, he had been taken with the righteous spirit of the volunteer army that rose in Zhuo Commandery of Youzhou, and he had supplied warhorses and weapons to the three chivalrous sworn brothers who led it — Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.
I had heard the remark on an internet broadcast, only for the fun of it, and yet it came back to me all at once. In the Three Kingdoms, the great merchants Zhang and Su sponsor the three sworn brothers, put up the investment, and then never appear again. Where on earth did Imperial Uncle Liu's patrons — those Zhangs and those Sus — disappear to? The bottom of the Yellow River?
Yes. I was Zhang Qian, only son of that Hebei magnate Zhang Shiping — the very man who had sponsored the volunteer army of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei. My courtesy name was Baijin, and true to it I was a gilded heir from the cradle, born to inherit a fortune of thousands in gold.
"My father, the foremost merchant in Hebei, has ordered me to find a new article of trade. I shall have to find one, whatever it takes."
Bohai Commandery, I learned, was a stretch of the continent that lay directly upon the sea, where the fishing trade had long flourished — the family's retreat, and a place of business besides.
"Young master, the master sends fleets of fishing boats to take great quantities of sardines and horse mackerel from the eastern sea here. He extracts the oil, turns the catch into a salted seafood paste, and sells it — together with sea salt — into the barren west, where there is no sea at all. From that west he brings silk and ore, and sells them in the east."
So my father, Zhang Shiping, was a man who knew the routes of supply and demand in every region.
"He sells the warhorses raised on the harsh lands of the north down into the south, and he brings rice and wheat grown in the hot south to sell in country that lives on barley. You are the master's own blood, young master. Surely here you will be able to find the very test he set you — a venture in goods that others do not sell, and yet that can be sold."
"I understand perfectly."
In my previous life I had run a modest concern under my father, standing in for him as vice president once he grew old, and I had launched ventures here and there alongside the old hands who had worked with him for decades — men I called uncle. And now I was supposed to do the same thing in the chaos of the late Han, in the age of the Three Kingdoms. Was this fate?
I had always believed there was nothing in the world that could not be sold. Even so, given the civilization and the customs of this age, I needed goods that anyone here could handle as an everyday thing. That meant, inevitably, something to eat or something to wear...
"It will have to be finished within three days."
"Young master, so you did have a plan! This Ak is awestruck!"
"Uncle Ak, I'll be walking these shores until evening, looking for the trade good Father spoke of. Lend me a hand."
"Need you even ask!"
Dropped into the chaos of the Three Kingdoms more than eighteen hundred years before my own time, I was no warlord, no scion of the imperial house, no general's son. I was the son of a merchant in a great trading house.
My life in the Three Kingdoms began here.