The scroll was warm in his hands.
It glowed with a soft, golden light, the same color as his other self's eyes.
His mother, the Supervisor of Hell's Quality Control and a professional at cosmic gaslighting, looked at him with a millennium of hope and fear.
"Your father's legacy," she whispered. "Be careful."
Li Wei, whose brain had just been informed that his dad was a historical celebrity, did the only thing he could.
He opened the scroll.
**
Bad idea.
Very, very bad idea.
It wasn't words.
It wasn't pictures.
It was data.
Two thousand years of memories, strategies, triumphs, and heartbreaks, all compressed into a single, divine zip file.
And it downloaded directly into his brain.
His poor, defenseless, already-overcrowded brain.
It felt like getting hit by a freight train made of pure information.
The Battle of Red Cliffs.
The Empty Fort Strategy.
The invention of the land mine.
The quiet sorrow of a dying lord.
The precise wind speed needed to make arrows from a boat.
It all came flooding in, a tidal wave of genius that threatened to drown the clumsy idiot who was Li Wei.
He screamed.
And then he passed out.
**
He woke up smelling coffee.
And desperation.
He was back in the mortal realm, sitting in a campus coffee shop.
Feng Yue was sitting across from him, looking stressed.
She had apparently dragged his unconscious body out of Hell and propped him up in a booth.
"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice tight. "You were muttering about... supply lines?"
Li Wei blinked.
His head felt... full.
Like someone had installed a whole new operating system without deleting the old one.
And the new OS was in a different language.
Information overload, a cold voice echoed in the back of his mind. It was Yang Mode, but he sounded... strained. Data is unsorted. Chaotic. Attempting to index two millennia of memories. Please stand by.
The northern wind is unfavorable for a naval assault, a second, much older voice whispered. It was calm, wise, and sounded suspiciously like a famous historical strategist.
What? Yin Mode, the original Li Wei, whimpered. Who said that? I want a latte.
The three voices argued in his head.
It was getting crowded in there.
**
The barista, a bored-looking student with a nose ring, came over.
"What can I get for you guys?" she asked, not looking up from her phone.
Feng Yue opened her mouth to order.
But Li Wei spoke first.
His voice was strange. Stilted. Formal.
"Honorable purveyor of roasted beans," he began, his posture unnaturally straight. "The strategic position of your milk frother is suboptimal. It leaves your flank exposed to a potential customer surge from the west entrance."
The barista looked up from her phone.
She stared at him.
"Bro, what?"
Feng Yue kicked him under the table. Hard.
"He'll have a black coffee," she said through gritted teeth.
Li Wei nodded sagely. "A wise choice. Black coffee requires minimal logistical support and boosts troop morale for early morning campaigns."
He looked at the barista, his eyes unfocused.
"Tell me," he said, his voice low and serious. "What are your thoughts on using the campus squirrels as a network of spies?"
The barista slowly backed away.
Feng Yue buried her face in her hands.
This was a new level of insanity.
He wasn't just an idiot anymore.
He was a tactical idiot.
**
But as he continued to mutter about flanking maneuvers and the strategic importance of sugar packet placement, she saw something else.
A flicker of brilliance.
A depth she hadn't seen before.
He looked at the campus map on the wall, and his eyes weren't just seeing buildings.
They were seeing chokepoints.
Vantage points.
Kill zones.
She had seen this look before. In the eyes of ancient generals. In the gaze of gods of war.
It was terrifying.
And it was, to her eternal frustration, incredibly hot.
Oh no, she thought, her heart giving a stupid little flutter. I think I have a thing for traumatized military strategists.
This was a problem.
A big problem.
**
The memory download was a disaster.
Yin Mode, the primary user of the Li Wei body, had no idea how to handle it.
He tried to walk to class and found himself analyzing the structural weaknesses of the library.
He tried to eat lunch and started calculating the optimal trajectory for a food fight.
The ancient memories were bleeding into his modern life, and he was losing himself in the process.
Other students started to notice.
"Did you see Li Wei today?" someone whispered in the hall. "He was talking to a pigeon. I think he was trying to recruit it."
"I saw him in the library. He was reading Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' and crying."
He was becoming a campus legend for all the wrong reasons. Again.
He felt the pressure mounting.
The weight of it all.
He wasn't just Li Wei, the clumsy history major, anymore.
He was Li Wei, the inheritor of Zhuge Liang's soul.
He was carrying the legacy of a man who changed the course of history.
A man who was a genius. A hero. A legend.
And he was... him.
A kid who considered finding matching socks a major life achievement.
The pressure was too much.
The expectations were impossible.
The sheer, crushing weight of being someone else, someone better, was going to break him.
He hid in a bathroom stall, his breath coming in ragged gasps, the voices in his head a cacophony of chaos.
I can't do this, Yin Mode sobbed. I'm not him. I'm not a hero.
The data is overwhelming, Yang Mode stated, his own voice showing a rare crack of strain. The emotional component of these memories is corrupting my logic.
The southern rebellion requires a firm hand, the ancient strategist advised calmly.
Li Wei clutched his head.
He was going to fall apart.
He was going to be another failed experiment. Another broken soul.
Another disappointment.
**
He stumbled into his afternoon lecture, late as usual.
History of Ancient Dynasties.
His favorite class.
Usually.
Today, it was just noise.
Professor Miller, a kindly old man with a passion for the Han dynasty, was drawing on the whiteboard.
"...and so, the business school's recent acquisition of the new science building's funding was a classic pincer movement," the professor was saying. "They leveraged their alumni donations to cut off the arts and humanities budget, leaving the history department completely isolated."
Li Wei froze.
The professor's words, filtered through Zhuge Liang's memories, suddenly made perfect, terrifying sense.
It wasn't a lecture.
It was a strategic briefing.
He saw it all.
The battlefield.
The enemy's strategy.
The fatal flaw in their attack.
He stood up.
He didn't mean to.
His body just... moved.
"Professor," he said, his voice ringing with an authority that silenced the entire lecture hall.
Professor Miller paused, chalk in hand. "Yes, Mr. Li?"
"Your analysis is flawed," Li Wei stated.
A gasp went through the room.
"You're thinking defensively," Li Wei continued, walking toward the front of the room. "You're trying to hold your ground. But the business school has superior resources. A war of attrition is a guaranteed loss."
He took the chalk from the professor's stunned hand.
"You're forgetting the element of surprise."
He began to draw on the whiteboard.
Not words.
Arrows.
Flanking routes.
Supply lines.
"The business school's main weakness is their coffee shop," Li Wei explained, his eyes glowing with a faint, golden light. "It's their primary source of morale. If we launch a pre-dawn raid, we can seize control of their espresso machine."
"It will cripple their morning productivity and throw their entire command structure into chaos."
He drew a large, dramatic arrow pointing directly at the business school's building on the campus map.
"While they're disoriented, we launch a secondary assault here," he said, tapping a spot on the map. "The Dean's office. We take him hostage and force him to renegotiate the budget."
"It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But it's our only path to victory."
He finished his drawing.
The whiteboard was now covered in a flawless, terrifyingly logical battle plan.
He turned to face the class.
The lecture hall was silent.
Every student was staring at him, their faces a mixture of awe, confusion, and fear.
Professor Miller looked at the whiteboard.
He looked at Li Wei.
Then, a slow smile spread across his face.
He picked up a new piece of chalk.
"Brilliant," he whispered. "Class, take notes. This will be on the final."
The students scrambled for their notebooks, furiously trying to copy the plan for a hostile takeover of the business school.
Li Wei just stood there, chalk dust on his fingers, wondering what the hell he had just done.
📣 [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
Did this chapter bless your braincell or ruin your will to live (in a good way)?
Drop a comment or throw a power stone — it's like XP for my soul.