The Villain

The Villain is a long-form time-travel historical novel set in the Three Kingdoms era, written by Geng Xin. It was first serialized on Qidian Chinese Network on April 23, 2008, and completed in January 2009, totaling roughly 2.68 million characters across 583 chapters. It is the first installment of Geng Xin's "Three Kingdoms Trilogy" (The Villain, The Cao Thief, and The Fierce Kinsman). The protagonist, originally an ordinary modern forest ranger, is reborn at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty as Dong Fei, the youngest son of Dong Zhuo. Historically Dong Zhuo had no such son, and this fabricated origin is itself the novel's greatest variable. Born ugly and possessed of extraordinary strength, Dong Fei is regarded as an oddity by his father; only his grandmother and elder sister truly protect him. He knows nothing of papermaking or gunpowder, and can rely only on the memories he gained from reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and on his innate prowess. To prevent his grandmother from meeting the same fate as in history—beheading at the hands of Huangfu Song—Dong Fei takes up arms from boyhood and steps into the age of chaos: recruiting fierce generals and gathering strategists, rising to power in Liangzhou with the aid of Jia Xu and others, clashing with warlords such as Lü Bu, Cao Cao, and Liu Bei, ultimately restoring and unifying the Han dynasty, then leaving his eldest son to oversee the state while he takes his family far away to Persia. The novel reconstructs the Three Kingdoms landscape through the Dong clan, written in a steady, finely wrought style with immersive battle scenes, repeatedly probing the boundaries between good and evil, success and failure, in the tension between "upholding the Han" and "surviving."