The White Wolf Gongsun

White Wolf Gongsun is a long-form historical time-travel novel by Yiyu Po Chunfeng. Serialized on Qidian from July 2017 and now completed, it runs to roughly 2.17 million Chinese characters and over eight hundred chapters. The story opens with a modern man whose soul is unexpectedly transported to the grasslands of the late Eastern Han dynasty, where he possesses Gongsun Zhi, the illegitimate eldest son of Gongsun Zan, General of the Household Gentlemen of the North. His birth mother has been murdered by his father's principal wife; after his merchant caravan is plundered, Gongsun Zhi is reduced to a horse-herding slave of the Xiongnu. He kills a guard and escapes, only to fall in with a band of horse thieves as their newest recruit. He retains his modern memories and a map-like perception that reveals the people and positions around him, but beyond that he has nothing to rely on. To survive in a world where one either devours or is devoured, he first makes a name for himself by fighting his way out of the bandit camp, gathers followers, and establishes his authority on the grasslands with a wolf's ruthlessness, overawing the Xiongnu and Wuhuan tribes. He then heads south and is drawn into the turmoil engulfing the realm around the time of Dong Zhuo's misrule in Luoyang, steadily building his power amid the fragmentation of the warlords. The novel takes a hard-edged path of conquest: the protagonist recites no poetry and invents nothing; he is decisive, vengeful, and utterly merciless in killing. The book focuses on the struggle for survival and power, and also depicts the cruelty of a chaotic age in which ordinary lives count for nothing.