The Convict

The Convict is a long historical time-travel novel by Geng Xin, serialized on Qidian from February 2009 and completed in February 2010. The online version runs about 1.73 million characters in over four hundred chapters, and the first print volume was published by Yanbian People's Publishing House in January of that year. The novel opens as Liu Shanjun, a twenty-first-century white-collar worker, is transported by an accident to the banks of the Si River in the twenty-sixth year of King Zheng of Qin and inhabits the body of a dead youth named Liu Kan. Liu Kan's father, Liu Fu, was once a retainer of the Lü family, and Liu Kan has known the Lü Zhi sisters since childhood as sweethearts. After taking refuge in Pei County, he befriends Shen Shiqi, Cao Wushang, Tang Li, and others, and has subtle dealings with Liu Bang, who appears in the guise of a street tough. When the First Emperor conscripts soldiers for the southern campaign against the Hundred Yue, local banditry must first be cleared, so Liu Kan joins the Qin army alongside Liu Bang; they win merit by killing the bandit chief Wang Ling at Zhaoyang Marsh, but Liu Kan is then convicted for rescuing Lü Zhi's brother and becomes a convict. During his sentence he works with Shen Shiqi and others to brew a tribute liquor, and his circumstances gradually improve, only for him to learn that Lü Zhi is about to marry Liu Bang. The book is divided into four parts—"The Hidden Dragon Does Not Act," "The Dragon Appears in the Field," "The Dragon Fights in the Wild," and "Now Leaping, Now in the Abyss"—chronicling how a modern man rises from commoner origins amid the chaos at the end of Qin and is drawn step by step into the struggles for the realm, interspersed with research on Qin and Han military and noble-rank systems and the various trades and classes, along with related appendices.