They weren’t speaking Japanese, nor did their attire resemble that of Japanese people. The fabric of their clothes was strange, almost as if it were made from the same material as burlap sacks—truly bizarre!

Suddenly, the woman seemed to remember something. She jumped over to the group of men, snatched a long spear, and began to dance with it on the beach. Isaac Hall gripped his shark gun tightly, nervously watching her every move. When she finished, the woman leapt away and pointed the spear at the riverbank, gesturing repeatedly.

Three characters appeared on the riverbank, written in traditional Chinese: “Shawn Irwin”.

Isaac Hall felt a jolt in his heart—finally, finally, he had found a way to communicate.

Without hesitation, he grabbed a hooked spear, jumped off the boat, and began writing on the sand as well, asking the question he most wanted answered: “Where is this place?”

Shawn Irwin stared blankly at the words on the sand. Isaac Hall, heart pounding, struggled to recall how to write in traditional characters. He finally remembered a few characters that were similar in both simplified and traditional forms. He immediately swung his spear again and wrote four large characters on the sand: “What place is this?”

Shawn Irwin cheered with delight and immediately wrote a reply on the sand: “Liaodong Daifang Commandery.”

Liaodong Daifang Commandery? Isaac Hall was stunned: What kind of name was that? Daifang—this seemed to be a term from the Han and Jin dynasties for the Liaodong Peninsula, which did fit the geography of the Yingkou region. But while the location was right, the time was not.

Through this halting exchange, Isaac Hall managed to figure out the situation before him: this was indeed still part of China, and indeed the location of Yingkou, but the time and space were completely different. The current era was the Sixteen Kingdoms period of the Eastern Jin.

This wasn’t an act! Isaac Hall realized with sorrow and helplessness that the blood pooling on the ground and the dozens of lives lost had already told him, in the most brutal way, that all of this was real.

Traveling through time and space? Entering another branch of history?

Isaac Hall found himself in despair, feeling utterly helpless—he had woken up to find himself an orphan of his original world. When he first awoke, he thought he was still lucky, having unknowingly escaped danger, but he never expected to have fallen into a disaster’s abyss, into the most chaotic and bloody era of slaughter in history.

This was the most chaotic period for the Chinese nation, a time that even historians agree has no reliable historical records. The banners of kings changed constantly atop city walls, and at one point, there were more than twenty large and small states coexisting on the northern plains. This was the infamous “Five Barbarians Ravage China” period in Chinese history.

Isaac Hall didn’t know much about this vague period of history; he only vaguely remembered that there was someone in this era named Martin Reed. It was said that he was the greatest hero of the Han people. At that time, the ethnic massacres grew ever more intense, and the Han people were nearly exterminated by the Hu tribes. In the north, they had become a minority—and the most despised minority at that. Meanwhile, the Hu were sharpening their weapons, preparing to march south and carry out a genocidal massacre of the Han.

At this critical moment, Martin Reed, in response to the Hu coalition’s “Edict to Slaughter the Han,” issued his own “Edict to Slaughter the Hu.” Once this order was given, the long-suffering Han people erupted in desperate resistance, and the Hu who had entered the Central Plains fled back to their homelands. Later, although Martin Reed was eventually wiped out by the combined forces of the Hu coalition and the Jin dynasty’s own armies, the fierce spirit awakened in the Han people earned the respect of the Hu. From then on, the Han’s lowly fate began to improve, and the oppression from the Hu gradually lessened, until Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei later implemented reforms that accelerated the process of ethnic integration.

Martin Reed was a tragic hero—not only did he fight against the Hu, but he was also betrayed by his own people. Moreover, because his “Edict to Slaughter the Hu” violated the Confucian doctrine of “gentleness and harmony” toward the barbarians, Confucian historians deliberately downplayed the earlier “Edict to Slaughter the Han” and focused on emphasizing the cruelty and inhumanity of the “Edict to Slaughter the Hu.” They called this kind of historical revisionism, half in praise and half in self-deprecation: the “Spring and Autumn brushwork.”

It was actually some overseas experts on Chinese history who more fairly stated: over a thousand years ago, it was Martin Reed’s desperate counterattack that saved the Han people from extinction. The later critics who could use the Chinese language and script to denounce Martin Reed’s cruelty owed it all to Martin Reed’s so-called “cruelty” in the first place.

Shawn Irwin belonged to the Yuwen clan of the Eastern Xianbei. Legend has it that the ancestors of the Xianbei were the youngest sons of the Yellow Emperor. In the past, the youngest sons were not favored, so they were sent to the distant and harsh northern lands—a place called the Zimeng Wilderness—where they established a tribe known as the Donghu. At the end of the Western Han, the Xiongnu retreated far away, and the Xianbei tribes began to migrate back, with some scattered Xiongnu joining the Xianbei, strengthening the Xianbei clan.

At that time, the Eastern Xianbei included the Duan, Murong, and Yuwen clans. Among them, the Duan clan was defeated by the Jie-led Later Zhao, merged into the Central Plains, and gradually migrated south. It is said that the Duan family of Dali in the Song dynasty were their descendants.

Previously, the Yuwen clan had been defeated by their old enemies, the Murong clan. All the princes were killed, and of the three princesses, one died and two were captured. Later, the youngest princess, Shawn Irwin, managed to escape from the Murong army with the help of her guards.