The Song Clan

The Song Clan is a long historical alternate-history novel by Song Moran, roughly 3.42 million characters long, completed in August 2013, with 890 chapters in total, divided into Volume One, Volume Two, Volume Three, and a VIP volume. The story is set against the Jingkang Incident at the end of the Northern Song: Jurchen cavalry sweep south, the prosperous Central Plains dynasty is shattered, Emperors Huizong and Qinzong are captured and taken north, and a dynasty highly developed in economy and culture collapses under the onslaught of northern peoples. The protagonist, Xu Wei, was originally a swindler in modern society; he travels back in time to Xujiazhuang in Xiazhi County, Daming Prefecture, becoming the youngest son of Old Man Xu, ninth in seniority and known as "Xu the Ninth." After recovering from illness, he uses "amnesia" as a cover, acts decisively, and bears the fearsome reputation of "the little tyrant of the Xu family." The story opens with him storming into the Datong gambling house to save his childhood friend Ma Tai and dealing with its new owner Yang Jinzhou, and from there he is drawn from street-level gambles into local conflicts between officials and bandits, the organization of militia, bandit suppression and relief of the capital, and then into the three-way contest among Song, Liao, and Jin and the power struggles of the court. In Xu Wei's plan, he could slowly build an official career, train troops, recruit followers, enclose land, and develop; but the Jin army's timetable for marching south does not wait for him. He can only grow stronger through war, fighting ever more powerfully, building his forces into a clan that "obeys summons but not deployment," surviving between imperial suspicion and the upheavals of a chaotic age, and striving to reverse the course of the Jingkang humiliation. With relatively solid historical detail, a plain and steady style, and a step-by-step pace, the novel depicts the situation of individuals and their era caught up in each other amid chaos.