The Unofficial Biography of Emperor Xian of Han

In 195 AD, Luoyang. An eleven-year-old boy wakes up from the flames. He is the Son of Heaven. He has no soldiers, no money, and no one to trust. Chang'an has just been sacked; Grand Tutor Wang Yun leaps from the city wall, his body crashing before the Meridian Gate. The Liangzhou army pillages and burns the capital, reducing it to ashes. And he—the emperor of the Han Empire—is treated as nothing. Not by Dong Zhuo, not by Li Jue and Guo Si, not by the warlords of Guanzhong who shift with the wind. To everyone, he is just a pawn—too young, too weak, too insignificant. But a pawn has one advantage: as long as it lives, it can still be useful. No one taught him how to be an emperor. He learned on the brink of death. From Chang'an to Hedong, from Hedong to Luoyang, he learned to walk on a blade's edge, to breathe in the cracks, and to believe in himself when no one else did. A decade later, when Cao Cao triumphs at Guandu with fewer troops, Liu Bei bides his time in Jingzhou, and Sun Quan consolidates his father and brother's legacy in Jiangdong, no one remembers that this child was once picked up from the ground like a chick. But he remains. And those who once treated him as a pawn eventually realize that a piece is missing from the board. They don't know where it went. It has stood up, walked off the board, and is now watching them play from above.