Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor

Xiran Jay Zhao

• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781665900713
• eBook ISBN: 9781665900720

Percy Jackson meets Tristan Strong in this hilarious middle grade "edge-of-your-seat adventure" (James Ponti, New York Times bestselling author of City Spies ) that follows a young boy as he journeys across China to seal the underworld shut and save the mortal realm. Zachary Ying never had many opportunities to learn about his Chinese heritage. His single mom was busy enough making sure they got by, and his schools never taught anything except Western history and myths. So Zack is woefully unprepared when he discovers he was born to host the spirit of the First Emperor of China for a vital mission: sealing the leaking portal to the Chinese underworld before the upcoming Ghost Month blows it wide open.The mission takes an immediate wrong turn when the First Emperor botches his attempt to possess Zack's body and binds to Zack's AR gaming headset instead, leading to a battle where Zack's mom's soul gets taken by demons. Now, with one of history's most infamous tyrants yapping in his headset, Zack must journey across China to heist magical artifacts and defeat figures from history and myth, all while learning to wield the emperor's incredible water dragon powers.And if Zack can't finish the mission in time, the spirits of the underworld will flood into the mortal realm, and he could lose his mom forever.

1 How to Get Superpowers by Reading Wikipedia

ZACK HAD LEARNED TO STOP opening the lunches his mom packed for him in front of his friends. He didn’t eat them anymore either. He loved his mom’s cooking, but his friends always wrinkled their noses as if the pungent sauces and spices hit them like a physical wave. Of course they made a big deal out of how the one Asian kid in school had the “weirdest” food. Ugh, he hated that this was a stereotype.

“Why care what others say?” His mom had been baffled when he’d begged her to just make him sandwiches. “My cooking is way tastier than slices of meat slapped between bread!”

She wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t understand the problem. Zack had finally gotten a steady friend group after going to a different middle school than his few friends from elementary; he didn’t want to risk getting left out again. Yet no matter how many times he told his mom she didn’t need to cook him full-on Chinese meals, she never listened, because “where would you get your nutrition?” And whenever he’d come home with his lunch uneaten, even with the excuse that he’d been practicing fasting for Ramadan, her scientist side would activate, and she’d unleash yet another lecture about the daily amount of protein and healthy vegetables a twelve-year-old boy needed.

It was easier to just pretend he’d eaten them.

Ignoring the stab of guilt to his heart, Zack hurried down the empty hallway with his lunch box tucked under his arm like he was smuggling something illegal. He stopped in front of a row of color-coordinated trash bins and unzipped the lunch box. The smell of stir-fried green beans and beef slices heaped juicily over rice exploded through the air. It made his mouth water, and he couldn’t help but eat a few sauce-soaked pieces with the chopsticks packed to the side, but he stepped back as he remembered the smell might stick to his hair and clothes. Plus, he didn’t want someone to catch him eating near literal trash bins in a hallway. The last thing he needed was another reason for the other kids to call him weird.

He popped open the compost bin.

“Whoa, kid. Are you really letting all that food go to waste?”

Zack startled at the voice, so close it was practically in his head. It was deep and gruff like a teacher’s, yet when Zack looked around the hallway, there was no one else around.

He set his lunch box on the lid of the paper-waste bin and checked his phone. No sudden notifications or apps that had opened or anything. He dug out the other device in his pockets that could’ve made a sound—his augmented reality portal-lens from XY Technologies. He slid it on over his eyes. Its clear interface spanned his vision as a single long lens. Transparent neon widgets for stuff like the time, temperature, and weather popped up along the edges of his view. But he’d gotten no new notifications there, either.

“Hey! Do you play Mythrealm on that?”

Zack jumped. This time it was for sure a real person speaking. Though instead of a deep, gruff voice, it was another boy. Another Asian boy, coming down the hall with a shy smile. The shiny floor glistened like a path of light beneath him.

Zack couldn’t help his shock. This part of town was so white that he’d been the only Asian kid all through sixth grade. He wondered if the boy was just here for summer school, or if he’d stay for the fall.

“Who doesn’t play Mythrealm?” Zack composed himself and pressed his voice low, as he always did when talking to someone new, because otherwise the first impression they got was that he looked and sounded like a girl. Even short hair and baggy clothes didn’t help when he was so scrawny. Still, he smiled a little. He loved being able to make friends through Mythrealm. It’d been a long time coming. The game—and XY Technologies’ portal-lenses in general—had blown up about three years ago, but that had also been when he and his mom had to move out of New York because she could no longer afford it, so she couldn’t afford to get him a portal-lens then either. Mythrealm did have a phone app version, but the controls were much more cumbersome, so nobody wanted to play with the kid who had to use their phone exclusively. Only after Zack’s mom had surprised him with a portal-lens on his birthday last year had he finally been able to play for real, make friends through it, and even earn a little money from trades on the secondary market—which was how he could afford to buy school lunches every day instead of eating what his mom had packed. “I’m even on the school team,” Zack added. “That’s why I’m here. Get some classes outta the way in summer, and there’s more time to prep for tournaments in the fall.”

“That’s awesome! Wanna add each other?” the boy said while opening the Mythrealm app on his phone. His accent sounded like Zack’s mom’s, which meant he was probably also from mainland China, speaking Mandarin Chinese as a first language.

Zack’s excitement slowed into caution, as it always did when he met another kid from China. There was a chance that politics would get between them, considering that Zack’s mom had to flee with him from the Chinese government when he was just a baby. Most Westerners thought of Chinese people as all having the same background and same beliefs, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Zack was often frustrated that English labeled them all as “Chinese,” while in Mandarin there was a clear difference between Huárén, someone of Chinese descent, and Dàlùrén, someone from mainland China. Huárén had been migrating all over the world for centuries, maybe millennia. Back in New York, his mom’s Chinese friends had been mostly from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian countries—those who were Huárén but not Dàlùrén, and thus were more likely to be as against the mainland Chinese government as she was.

It wasn’t that Zack had to stay away from all fellow mainlanders. After all, his mom had friends from there, too. But he first had to figure out if the boy was gung-ho about the Chinese government—the way some kids here believed the American government was all good and powerful without questioning it—before getting too close to him. It was an awkward question to ask right away, though, so Zack just flashed a hopefully natural-looking smile and opened his own Mythrealm profile on his portal-lens, which was connected to his phone app.

“So you’re Zachary Ying, right?” The boy held up the friending QR code on his phone screen. “I’m Simon Li.”

“How’d you know my name?” Zack frowned as he pointed a finger beneath the code, which made his portal-lens scan it. A thin neon square closed around the code and flashed, then Simon’s profile popped up in Zack’s view. He tapped the floating friend-request button.

“A teacher told me!”

Zack blinked fast. He didn’t know how to feel about that. He could guess what had happened—Simon must’ve dropped into summer school for some August classes, and a teacher must’ve told him to find Zack, as if they should automatically be friends just because they were both Chinese. It was another sharp reminder that when people looked at Zack, Chinese was all they saw. Ha-ha, of course the two Asian kids found each other, he could already imagine the other kids saying.

A familiar exhaustion weighed down on Zack. He was tired of being singled out because of how he looked, which had gotten so much worse after moving to Maine. Back in New York, people were so diverse that his race was hardly a huge deal, but here, it was like he walked with a glaring sign saying FOREIGNER. He didn’t get it. He was as American as any other kid in his classes. He couldn’t even speak Mandarin besides a few basic phrases. Why couldn’t people see past his face?

“So is your family name the same Ying as the First Emperor’s?” Simon turned his phone back toward himself. His thick bangs seriously needed trimming; they were so long that they basically hid his eyes.

“The what?” Zack took off his portal-lens and smoothed out his own hair, which his mom always complained was too messy.

“The First Emperor of China. Everyone calls him by his title, Qin Shi Huang, but his real name was Ying Zheng. Is your Ying the same as his Ying? I mean, there are a couple of different family names that are read as Ying, but his is really rare. ’Cause, you know, most of his kids were killed when his dynasty fell. But if your Ying is his Ying, you’re probably from a surviving lineage!”

“What are you talking about?” Zack’s own last name didn’t sound like a real word anymore.

Well, it never sounded like a real word. He had no idea if it meant anything. Besides, he hated it. He’d been teased all his life about how it made his name sound like a verb. Zacharying. Past definitions included “running out of breath faster than anyone else in gym,” “acting like a girl when you’re a boy,” and, of course, “bringing weird food to school.”

“You don’t know who the First Emperor of China is?” Simon recoiled. “Wow, what is going on in American schools? He, like, invented China! That’s a big deal, even for world history! By 221 BCE, he had conquered the Seven Warring States and declared himself—”

Oh God. This was too much. Ha-ha, of course the two Chinese kids are nerding out about ancient Chinese history together, Zack imagined other kids saying again.

“Listen, uh”—he cut Simon off—“speaking of history, I actually have that class right now. And I told the teacher I’d only be at the bathroom for a little while. I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Oh. Okay.” Simon whipped his bangs out of his eyes, which caught the gleam of his phone screen. “You should search up the First Emperor of China, though. He’s pretty cool. I’ll send you a link!”

“All right. Thanks.” Zack snatched his lunch box off the paper-waste bin lid.

“Wait, were you gonna throw that food out?” Simon pointed.

“What?” Zack laughed a little too stiffly. He slapped the compost bin shut. “Of course not. I was throwing… something else out.”

“Kid, you care way too much about what other people think.”

Zack jolted, then looked around as cold sweat broke under his shirt and jeans. That voice definitely didn’t come from his phone or portal-lens.

“What’s wrong?” Simon’s gaze turned weirdly piercing.

“Um. Nothing. Just… bye.” Zack shuffled away.

When he passed the bathroom, he briefly thought of flushing his lunch down a toilet, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of doing that to his mom’s cooking. At least compost went somewhere valuable. Or so he told himself.

Maybe the voice was his conscience.

But since when were consciences so loud?

---

Once Zack got back to history class, he sat down with his friends to continue their project on Alexander the Great.

“Welcome back. Had fun?” quipped Aiden from across the small round table, twirling his tablet pen with a lazy grin. He was the captain of their Mythrealm team, and Zack’s heart had an embarrassing tendency to beat faster around him. Not only was Aiden absurdly tall, his short blond hair was always impeccably styled.

“I got held up by this random new Chinese kid, actually,” Zack muttered, averting his gaze from Aiden’s pale blue eyes. “You guys heard anything about him?”

“Why are you asking us? You’re the one who’s also Chinese,” said Trevor, another member of their Mythrealm team. He had shaggy brown hair and wore the same weatherworn hoodie year-round. Or maybe it was two twin hoodies that he switched around. Theories differed.

“That doesn’t mean I know anything about him!” Zack spluttered. “That’s why I’m asking!”

Trevor’s hands shot up in defense. “Sorry. Don’t sue me.”

Zack tensed back a sigh, not wanting to seem so sensitive that he’d get offended at a single comment. After checking to make sure Ms. Fairweather was busy helping another group, he scrolled on his phone under the table. Simon had already sent him a message on Mythrealm and a link to an article about the First Emperor of China. “This kid’s kind of intense. He said a whole bunch of stuff about some emperor and made me add him on Myth—whoa.”

“What?” Trevor peeked over at Zack’s phone, which was open to Simon’s Mythrealm profile. It showcased six favorite virtual myth creatures in Simon’s collection, visible to friends only. All of them were maxed rank and extremely rare.

Trevor’s jaw dropped as well. “Is that an Exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: How to Get Superpowers by Reading Wikipedia
• Chapter 2: How Not to Win a Battle Using Soup
• Chapter 3: How Video Game Nerds Can Be Trounced With Ancient Chinese Military Tactics
• Chapter 4: How the Creation of China Was Exactly Like American Idol
• Chapter 5: How to Get Rich and Famous by Renting Your Body to a Dead Emperor
• Chapter 6: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
• Chapter 7: How the Qin State Unified China By Turning Itself into an MMO
• Chapter 8: How Chinese Sherlock Homes and Chinese Leeroy Jenkins Can Help a Museum Heist
• Chapter 9: How to Cope with Being a Supervillain’s Henchboy
• Chapter 10: How a Leaf Can Return to Its Tree
• Chapter 11: How Your Ancestor Can Be a Bird
• Chapter 12: How Legendary Poets Duke It Out
• Chapter 13: How to Pull Off a Good Boy, Bad Emperor Routine By Yourself
• Chapter 14: How to Scam the Ancient Chinese Justice League
• Chapter 15: How to Turn the Tides. Literally.
• Chapter 16: How It Feels to Have an Easy Fight for Once
• Chapter 17: How to Slay Immortals By Becoming Underwater Darth Vader
• Chapter 18: How the Great Wall Can Be Appropriated as a Racetrack
• Chapter 19: How to Get What You Want at All Costs
• Chapter 20: How to Handle Ultimate Power
• Chapter 21: How to Be a Benevolent Gang Leader
• Chapter 22: How to Wake Qin Dynasty Romeo Back Up
• Chapter 23: How to Force Your Way Through Someone Else’s Daddy Issues
• Chapter 24: How a New Emperor Is Born
• Chapter 25: How Everybody Sucks and Nothing’s Over
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright