Ten Kingdoms Courier

One courier. A land torn by war. Every letter you carry could be your last.

In 912, twelve-year-old Zhou Ping'an takes his first errand at Chenqiao Post Station: carry one letter thirty li. Sixty-seven years later he is still carrying them. Five dynasties come and go — Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, Later Zhou, and one more called Song. The roads do not change. The seals, the ledgers and the bronze bells do not change. What changes is the flag, the magistrate, and the terms of surrender and live.

A text-driven historical visual novel — no voice acting — built on the historical record of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, a violent age of civil war after the fall of the Tang. Every chapter stands on a real year: the end of the Liang, Wang the Iron Spear, the gates of Shu, Zhongdu, Chenqiao. Each one is traceable in the notes.

How it plays

• Choices cost something. 143 choice points, 428 options. A wrong turn can kill you — courts-martial, floods, cliff roads, arrows, routed soldiers: thirty ways to die.
  
• Four endings. Read all twenty-four chapters and arrive at Delivered, The Road Home, A Lifetime Late, or the coda No Kingdom to Serve.
  
• 242 historical notes. Each gives only the source and the necessary original text — never an explanation of the setting.
  
• 126 paintings and stills, collected in a gallery you can revisit.

Features

• Six volumes, twenty-four chapters, over 230,000 characters, about eight hours per run
  
• Historical nodes from the Five Dynasties record: Old History of the Five Dynasties, New History of the Five Dynasties, Zizhi Tongjian, Ten States Spring and Autumn and others
  
• Hand-painted ink-and-colour visuals
  
• Music and sound effects — no voice acting (a text-driven read)

The flags changed a good many times. All his life he carried official letters.