Ash Road

——The sharp edge is hidden under the ashes, and the universe is determined between blood and fire. In the winter of the twelfth year of Yongchang, the beacon fire of General Shen Wei's victory in the Northern Expedition was not yet extinguished, but the snow in the imperial capital first dyed the Shen family's ancestral hall red. Eight-year-old Chen Jin curled up among the corpses, biting half of a bloody jade between his teeth, and watched helplessly as the Secret Service hanged his eldest sister under a century-old locust tree. The emperor's casual words of "relying on merit and arrogance" turned the men of the Shen family, who had been loyal for three generations, into the ghosts of the execution ground, and the female family members became the withered bones of prostitutes. He was the only one who was forced into a corpse truck in exchange for his life by his father's secret guards, and became the only one who slipped through the net in this "Tiger Massacre". This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.