Henry Foster turned his head to glance at Ethan Carter, truly in no mood to scold the ugly maid Ethan Carter for barging in again to disturb him. He waved his hand, signaling her to leave and not to remain in the study and be an eyesore.

According to the experience of the dream figure Simon Blake, yesterday Henry Foster broke the water jade bowl in the study that his father cherished most—in the terms of the dream, it should be called a crystal bowl. He picked up a palm-sized shard from the bottom of the bowl and spent a whole day and night grinding it into a convex lens.

The bottom of the water jade bowl was already thick in the middle and thin at the edges, somewhat resembling a convex lens, and the water jade was as clear and lustrous as water. With great patience, Henry Foster spent more than a day and night smoothing out the sharp edges of the broken bowl bottom and refining the previously rough curved surface to be even more delicate.

This afternoon, he successfully focused a beam of sunlight into a tiny spot the size of an ant on a sheet of xuan paper.

Henry Foster watched with his own eyes as the spot of light on the xuan paper gradually turned it yellow and scorched, until finally a small flame sprang up, burning through the thick paper as tough as ramie!

Henry Foster did not know whether anyone in the present age was aware that a water jade lens could be used to start a fire, but before the dream of the previous night, he himself had absolutely no idea of this.

The dream of the previous night was not mere fantasy!

All afternoon, Henry Foster sat at his desk like a withered tree, silent and motionless, repeatedly recalling the seemingly absurd dream from the night before, trying to find more fragments of history about the state of Chu, especially after the twelfth year of Tianyou.

However, although the dream figure Simon Blake was fond of reading history, since the late previous dynasty when the warlords divided the land, the Central Plains had been in utter chaos, and Simon Blake's understanding of that period was also quite vague and fragmented.

From afternoon until dusk, all Henry Foster learned was that later historians judged Emperor Tianyou's late reign as muddled and incompetent. In the seventeenth year of Tianyou, that is, 917 AD, he died of illness, and was succeeded by the depraved and brutal crown prince Edward Young.

Edward Young, already addicted to elixirs as crown prince, died of elixir poisoning less than a year after ascending the throne. Afterward, the Grand Empress Dowager The Scott Family and the ministers enthroned the eleven-year-old great-grandson Ethan Young, with Empress Dowager Scott ruling from behind the curtain and holding the real power in Chu.

To eliminate dissent, Empress Dowager Scott first poisoned to death the third son of Emperor Wu, the newly adult Prince of Linjiang Evan Young; then sent envoys to seize the military command of Emperor Wu's second son, Prince Xin Eric Young.

Prince Xin Eric Young, unwilling to surrender, led his troops across the river and besieged Jinling for a hundred days, causing over a million soldiers and civilians trapped in the city to starve to death, turning the once-prosperous Jinling of Jiangnan into a city of the dead.

After failing to take Jinling by force, Prince Xin was forced to lift the siege and leave, then plundered the various prefectures of Jianghuai, and the ensuing wars utterly devastated the Jiangnan region, which had only just enjoyed two or three decades of peace, leaving nine out of ten homes empty.

At that time, the powerful states of Liang and Jin in the Central Plains were also plagued by constant warfare, attacking each other for decades, until the northern steppe tribes, the Mongols, rose and invaded...

Apart from a few phrases like "raised troops in ancestral land Xuanzhou, was captured by his own soldiers en route and executed by dismemberment in the marketplace," Henry Foster found no more records about himself between the twelfth and seventeenth years of Tianyou in these fragments of memory.

In later histories, he was merely an insignificant figure, and it was only because of his father David Foster that such a casual mention of him remained.

Henry Foster had lived carelessly for eighteen years, never caring about the lives or deaths of others, much less about the chaos and ruin of the country after his own death. Yet as he sat by the window, combing through the dream figure Simon Blake's memories of this period, he could clearly feel the piercing pain embedded in these fragments of memory.

This must have been the real feeling of the dream figure Simon Blake when reading history.

Perhaps because the feelings in the dream were so vivid, as if he had truly lived a lifetime in that world, Henry Foster's own state of mind was inevitably affected by this heart-wrenching pain, and he sat dazed by the window, unable to control his emotions for a moment...

Damn! Damn! Damn!

Before the seventeenth year of Tianyou, he still hadn't figured out why he would die so miserably, and yet he was already feeling sorrow for the chaos of the world—he really was broad-minded!

Henry Foster rubbed his face hard with both hands, trying to dispel his frustration and sorrow, thinking that if he returned to Xuanzhou now and never left again, would he be able to change the fate of "being captured by his own soldiers on the way to Xuanzhou and executed"?

At this thought, Henry Foster almost jumped up to pack his bags and run.

But as he pressed his hands on the desk, not yet standing up, a thought flashed through his mind: even if the family soldiers like Charles Grant did not stop him, that little bitch Yvonne Bailey and her lover, who failed to poison him the night before and had their plot exposed by him, how could they possibly let him go?

Henry Foster sat there, hands and feet cold, like a trapped beast in a cage, seeing all around him nothing but butcher's knives ready to stab into his flesh and devour him.

That little bitch Yvonne Bailey was clearly the courtesan of Wan Hong Lou, with countless men dreaming of stripping her naked and tossing her onto a brocade bed to dote on and ravage her. What on earth had he done to offend them, that they would go to such lengths to poison him?

Even with his thick skin, Henry Foster knew this matter was not so simple. There was no way that just by fleeing back to Xuanzhou, he could escape danger!