The End of the Sui Dynasty

The End of the Sui Dynasty is an alternate-history web novel by Muzi Lanse, serialized on Qidian.com from January 2012 and completed in April 2013. At roughly 3.2 million characters across more than 900 chapters, it opens the author's Sui-Tang Trilogy. The protagonist, Chen Kefu, is the son of Chen Shen, crown prince of the Southern Chen. On the day he is born, the Southern Chen is destroyed by Sui armies; he is entrusted to a loyal minister who smuggles him out of the palace and raises him in hiding among commoners. At twenty-two, he conceals his background from his family and, with a few manor hands, joins Emperor Yang of Sui's third campaign against Goguryeo. In white robe on a white horse, he distinguishes himself amid a million soldiers and draws the emperor's notice, and it is in this first battle that a young soul from the twenty-first century transmigrates into his body. From then on, knowing the Sui is doomed yet bearing the identity of a fallen royal house, Chen Kefu can only build merit on the Liaodong front first: breaking enemy lines and raising camps, drilling and training troops, fighting Goguryeo and repelling the Turks, gradually turning Liaodong into his base. After Yang Xuangan's rebellion and the empire's collapse, he follows the strategy of stocking grain and delaying kingship to accumulate strength, maneuvering among the Sui court, aristocratic clans, and rival warlords. When the realm fragments into competing states and the Tang rises, he finally strikes back into the Central Plains, contending with the various kingdoms, and ultimately founds a new dynasty that replaces the Tang, drawing together the historical scene of warlords competing in the late Sui and early Tang. The book is chiefly devoted to warfare, with intrigue and human nature woven in, its plot advancing layer by layer; it is one of the more widely circulated alternate-history web novels of the late-Sui power-struggle genre.