All Under Heaven

All Under Heaven is a long novel of the "Tang time-travel" genre by the web novelist Gao Yue. It was serialized on Qidian from August 2010 and completed in November 2011, totaling more than seven hundred chapters in fifteen volumes and about 3.19 million characters. The story is set in the fifth year of the Tianbao era under Emperor Xuanzong of Tang: the Tang had stood for over a century, and Li Longji, now past sixty, had grown weary of state affairs after conferring the title of Imperial Consort on Lady Yang and turned his mind to song and music, so that "from then on the sovereign rose late." Yet undercurrents at the border garrisons and the court did not subside. In the spring of that year, Li Qing'an, a modern man who had gone missing in a Tianshan blizzard, travels through time, is rescued by a Sogdian merchant, and later arrives at the Sulou Beacon Fort in Anxi, where the fort commander takes him in as a groom, drawing him into the frontier army. The novel opens with fighting beyond the passes on the Anxi front; the protagonist starts as a new recruit at the fort, repels powerful neighbors and wins repeated military merit, and then, through escorting a princess eastward, enters the center of power in Chang'an, maneuvering among frontier commanders, court factions, and harem forces. The book is divided into fifteen volumes, from "Blood-Red Anxi" and "The Moon Rises Over Tianshan" to "Settling All Under Heaven," weaving territorial expansion, battlefield combat, political struggle, and romance into a long thread in which "the realm and the beauty" coexist, ultimately driving toward an ending in which the protagonist reigns over all under heaven. The work is distinguished by its solid Tang historical background, vast battle scenes, and strategy-minded plotting, and is the most acclaimed of Gao Yue's "Mid-Tang Trilogy."