Chu

Chu is a historical time-travel web novel by Zhuang Buzhou, serialized on Qidian from 2010 and now complete, totaling about 1.62 million characters. The story opens at Daze Township: the modern man Gong Wei opens his eyes and hears the night cry of a wild fox from the woods in the distance—"Great Chu shall rise; Chen Sheng shall be king"—and finds himself present at the first large-scale peasant uprising in Chinese history. The sparks of rebellion have already been scattered, and he cannot stand aside; he can only throw himself into the tide sweeping the realm. Gong Wei thinks he knows the history books and can sail smoothly on the strength of later knowledge, but soon discovers that real history is full of deceit and lies, and that a time traveler is not omnipotent. He moves among the great figures of the age—Chen Sheng, Wu Guang, Liu Bang, Xiang Yu—witnessing major upheavals such as the Battle of Julu and the Chu-Han Contention; he must face the kill-or-be-killed decisions of the battlefield and also tell truth from falsehood and stay alive amid the political struggles of the various factions. Set against the contest of the warlords at the end of the Qin dynasty, the work portrays an ordinary man's choices, struggles and growth in the flood of his times, with both the grand spectacle of historical romance and the brisk pacing characteristic of web fiction.