The moment the Celestial Pearl slid down his throat, the world did not end. It dissolved.
There was no searing heat, no explosive force, no agony. Pain is a sensation of the flesh, a message carried by nerves to the brain, and Ying Zheng no longer had flesh, or nerves, or a brain. The solid, reassuring weight of his own body vanished. The oppressive heat of the cauldron, the terrified face of Xu Fu, the granite-like stoicism of Li Si, the very ground of the sacred mountain beneath his feet—all of it ceased to exist.
He was adrift.
Not in darkness, for blackness is the absence of light. This was the absence of absence. It was everything, all at once, a simultaneous perception of all that was, is, and could be. He felt the slow, inexorable grinding of the tectonic plates deep beneath Mount Tai. He felt the silent, patient growth of a single pine tree on its wind-swept peak. He felt the cold ambition in Li Si's heart, a calculated fear for the empire's future. He felt the fanatical, desperate hope in Xu Fu's soul, a prayer that his alchemy was not a lie.
He was everything and nothing. A disembodied consciousness floating in a storm of pure information. For a lesser man, the experience would have been instant, merciful oblivion. But Ying Zheng was not a lesser man. His ego, forged in the crucible of war and honed by absolute power, was a fortress. He existed because he willed himself to exist.
And then, the echoes came. Not as memories, but as vivid, living realities, crashing into his awareness like tidal waves.
"All within the seas, all under heaven, is now one!"
The roar of his own coronation ceremony in his capital of Xianyang. He felt the immense weight of the imperial crown upon his head, the scratch of the silk robes against his skin, the collective awe of ten thousand prostrated courtiers washing over him like a physical force. It was the moment he ceased to be Ying Zheng, King of Qin, and became Qin Shi Huang, the First August Thearch. The feeling was intoxicating, divine.
"The old ways breed dissent! The old words breed confusion! There will be one history, and it will begin with Zhen! Burn the books! Bury the scholars!"
His own voice, cold and final, echoing in a grand hall. He felt the heat from the pyres in the city square, smelled the acrid smoke of burning bamboo scrolls and priceless silks. He heard the faint, muffled screams of men—confucian scholars, philosophers, historians—as they were pushed into deep pits, their protests silenced by shovels of dirt. He felt no remorse. It was surgery. The body politic was sick with the cancer of the past, and he was the only surgeon ruthless enough to cut it out.
"The wall will stretch from the desert to the sea! It will be a dragon of stone and earth, and it will guard the Central Kingdom for ten thousand generations! March!"
The cheer of a million soldiers, laborers, and convicts, a sound so vast it shook the very air. He felt the biting wind of the northern plains, the sting of sand in his eyes, the sheer, mind-boggling scale of his ambition made manifest in stone. He was not just building a wall; he was scarring the face of the earth with his will.
These were his triumphs. They were the foundations of his eternal glory. But the stream of time did not stop in his present. It began to accelerate, to pull him forward, and the echoes turned sour, then horrifying.
He saw his own grand tomb, the one he had spent decades designing. The silent, stoic terracotta soldiers standing guard over his bronze sarcophagus, the rivers of mercury flowing for eternity. It was perfect. A palace for his eternal life. Then, with a sickening lurch, he saw it being broken into. Not by conquerors, but by clumsy peasants, centuries later, their crude tools shattering his perfect soldiers. Grave robbers. His eternal sanctum, desecrated by vermin.
A new vision slammed into him, more painful than any physical blow. He saw his eldest son and chosen heir, the thoughtful and compassionate Fusu, reading a forged edict. The seal was that of the Emperor—his seal. The words ordered him to commit suicide. And his son, ever dutiful, ever respectful of his father's authority, obeyed without question.
"No," a thought screamed through the void. It was not a word, but a pure concept of denial. "Not Fusu! He was to be the anchor of the future! Who dared? Who forged my will?"
He saw the face of his younger son, Huhai. Weak. Petulant. And beside him, the smiling, triumphant face of the eunuch Zhao Gao and the grim, complicit face of his own Chancellor, Li Si.
"LI SI! YOU! You betrayed me! You betrayed the empire for a puppet!"
The rage was a fire that threatened to burn his very consciousness to ash. The stream of time showed him the result of their treason. His dynasty, the one he had promised would last for ten thousand years, the one for which he had sacrificed everything and everyone, crumbled. It fell apart in less than fifteen years, collapsing into peasant rebellions and a vicious civil war between ambitious generals. The Qin, his Qin, was erased, replaced by a new dynasty, the Han.
"Lies!" he roared into the temporal storm. "Deception! This is not my legacy! This is not the eternity I was promised! This is failure! A failure born of betrayal!"
The river of time became a torrent, mercilessly dragging him forward. He saw flashes of dynasties rising and falling like sparks from a forge. The Han, who built upon his foundations but condemned his name. The glittering, cosmopolitan Tang, who opened the gates to the world. The refined, scholarly Song, whose artistic brilliance was matched only by their military weakness. He saw them fall to the thundering hooves of the Mongol hordes from the northern steppes—the very barbarians his Great Wall was built to keep out. He saw the khan, Kublai, sit upon the Dragon Throne in a city he did not recognize. The Yuan.
"Barbarians!" his consciousness shrieked. "Filth! Defiling the sacred throne of the Son of Heaven!"
The Yuan fell. A new native dynasty arose, the Ming, who pushed the Mongols out and rebuilt the Wall even grander than before. For a moment, he felt a flicker of grim satisfaction. But they too grew decadent. They too succumbed to internal rot. And from the north-east, a new group of barbarians, the Manchu, swept down. They took the capital. They forced the men of the Central Kingdom to shave their heads and wear their hair in a queue, a mark of submission. A new dynasty. The Qing.
The visions became more chaotic, more alien. He saw strange, smoke-belching metal beasts, carriages that moved at impossible speeds without horses. He saw ships, not of wood, but of grey steel, larger than any palace, that spit fire and thunder across the ocean, shattering coastal forts with contemptuous ease.
He saw men with pale faces, round eyes of blue and grey, and hair the color of straw and fire. Their banners were unfamiliar—a crimson sun with stripes, a cross of red and white. They landed on the shores of his land not as supplicants or traders, but as masters. They carried long, black tubes that exploded with fire and smoke, felling Qing soldiers from a hundred paces away. They sold a black, sticky poison—opium—that turned millions into hollow-eyed ghosts, draining the silver from the treasury and the soul from the people.
Ying Zheng (Internal Monologue): "What is this sorcery? What are these weapons? What has become of the Central Kingdom? How could it have fallen so low? Weak. It has become weak! Ruled by barbarians, and now humbled by barbarians from across the sea! They trample upon the divine land, and my descendants do nothing but bow their heads!"
The torrent of information was too much. The weight of two thousand years of failure, of decay, of humiliation, pressed down on him. His consciousness, his sense of self—the monolithic, unshakable ego of the First Emperor—was being pulled apart, stretched thin, eroded by the sheer, crushing force of the timeline. He was a single drop of ink in an infinite, raging ocean. Any other soul would have dissolved, its memories scattered, its will broken into a million pieces, becoming nothing more than a faint echo in the storm.
But he was not any other soul.
He was the man who had stared down six rival kingdoms and brought them to their knees. He was the man who had executed his own mother's lover and exiled her to unify his power. He was the man who had declared himself a living god. The universe was trying to erase him, and he met its cosmic indifference with pure, tyrannical rage.
Ying Zheng (Internal Monologue): "NO! I am Ying Zheng! I am the First August Thearch! I bent the world to my will once! I will not be unmade by mere visions of failure! The Mandate is MINE! Heaven gave it to me, and it cannot be rescinded by the incompetence of my successors! I AM ETERNAL!"
He fought back. With nothing but the sheer, indomitable force of his will, he fought against the dissolution. He remembered the feeling of the imperial seal in his hand, the absolute certainty of his own authority. He focused on that feeling, on the core of his identity. He gathered the fraying strands of his consciousness, pulling them together, forging them anew in the fire of his rage. He became a focal point of pure, tyrannical focus in the middle of the temporal maelstrom. He refused to die. He refused to fade.
And as he battled to hold himself together, something in the chaotic river of time answered.
Through the storm of visions, he felt a pull. A hook. An anchor point. It was a consciousness, but it was weak, fragile, and flickering. A vacuum of will. A soul on the verge of extinguishing itself, filled with fear, confusion, and despair. It was an empty shell in the year 1875 AD. A vessel.
A perfect vessel.
With a final, monumental effort of will, Ying Zheng's consciousness, now a blazing comet of pure ego, surged towards that flickering light. The storm of two thousand years of history collapsed into a single, blinding point of light.
And he fell into it.