Yueguang had made the decision before he had made the plan. Jiuyuan District, Baotou, Inner Mongolia — a search on a map, a place he had never visited and had somehow already lived in. He needed to stand there on his own two feet and find out what the modern streets had built over. But a historian at a firm does not simply disappear for a week. There were reports due, a boss who did not believe in unscheduled leave, and a story he could not tell anyone without sounding as though the crossings had finally broken something in him.
He was still working out how to ask for the time he needed — how to explain an absence he could not justify — when someone knocked.
He had not told anyone he would be home. He had not told anyone anything.
The bronze was still in his pocket, warm now from his own hand. He crossed the room and opened the door not knowing which he feared more: that it would be nothing, or that it would be exactly what he had been waiting for.
What does a careful man pay, for the one thing his caution cannot buy him?
Chapter Ten of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 arrives Sunday, July 19.
The Dangerous Bargain
About this chapter
Chapter Ten asks what a careful man is willing to trade for permission to go looking. Lü Yueguang has spent twelve years inside the safety of sourced fact and institutional procedure — and now a door, a decision, and a price he did not expect to have to name are waiting for him. The Dangerous Bargain is a chapter about what a scholar surrenders to become a seeker: who he is willing to trust, what he is willing to owe, and the moment institutional permission stops being the only kind that matters. It asks whether the truth on the other side of a bargain is ever really free.
About Tales of Alive
Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is a historical novel by 吕恩豪, set between contemporary Shenzhen and Han Dynasty China. Book One follows a man trained to read the past who finds himself forced to live inside it. New chapters publish every Sunday on WebNovel and Royal Road. Every court session, every meal, every execution has a source. What the author cannot prove is marked clearly. The rest, they will stand behind.
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- Chapter One — The Weight of Plastic and Dust
- Chapter Two — The Vessel of Wrath
- Chapter Three — The Weight of the Bargain
- Chapter Four — The Echo of the Breaking
- Chapter Five — The Bureaucrat’s Halberd
- Chapter Six — The Long March
- Chapter Seven — The River of Rot
- Chapter Eight — The Shards of Home
- Chapter Nine — The Ghost in the Glass
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