Nine-year-old orphan Feng Qiumei lost her parents to a cave collapse and was living with her aunt in the mining area. In the black waves of the coal washing plant, she swallowed gruel mixed with cinders and witnessed the dying struggle of the lame female cat and the burnt knuckles of her co-workers. The literacy teacher left half a copy of the Constitution, which allowed her to trace the strokes of freedom in the soot-filled night, and use menstrual blood to write twenty-eight reports on the mine wall.
In the tenth year when pneumoconiosis corroded the lung lobes, she tore open her diseased body in the Supreme Court, and 300 pages of X-rays and blood documents turned into a thunder in the courtroom. When the ashes fell into the inkstone of Zidi Primary School, a clear spring with the smell of ink gushed out from the abandoned mine.
Thirty years of wind and snow, white-fronted cats are like moving tombstones, embedding copper coins and innocent souls into the cracks of the railway tracks. When the newly built train ran over the cave dwellings of our ancestors, the soot danced into a phosphorus fire in the setting sun - it was the lamp held up by the survivors, illuminating the faded annotations on the title page of the code. An orphan miner who fights for justice with his life, an industrial epic half soaked in blood and tears.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
