Guoshi

Guoshi is a historical time-travel web novel by Pudding Bear Paw. It has been serialized on Zongheng Chinese since October 2013 and is set against the Mongol invasion of the late Southern Song in the mid-thirteenth century. The protagonist, Zheng Yunming, is reborn as the son of the Southern Song chancellor Zheng Qingzhi. He lives through the disastrous Duanping Northern Expedition, Zheng Qingzhi's dismissal as chancellor, and the full outbreak of war between Song and Mongols, moving between battlefields such as Xiangyang and Shatou Market. The title "Guoshi" comes from the question "The state has nurtured its scholars for three hundred years; now it is time for scholars to repay the state": with the realm shattered, should a modern man choose to flee and scrape by, carve out a separatist base in the chaos, or shoulder the collapsing edifice alone as a loyal minister? The novel builds on historical scenes such as the defense of Xiangyang, river naval battles, and siege warfare; it depicts the struggles of anti-Mongol generals such as Meng Gong, Cao Youwen, and Du Gao, and the fate of ordinary soldiers and common people in a time of chaos. The author states that the titles, official system, artifacts, and institutions in the book may not fully match historical fact and that some details were artistically adjusted for narrative reasons, but the overall work is grounded in research and attempts, within a fictional framework, to recreate the strategic situation and the conflicts of loyalty and nation in the Song-Yuan transition. About one million characters long and eighty-five chapters in total, it has no complete ending because serialization stopped; it is a relatively representative web historical novel set in the late Song.