Republican Era: The Mountain Fetus Gains Sentience, Braving the Pass and Battling Horse Thieves

After transmigrating to the twelfth year of the Guangxu reign, Qu Shaoyang becomes a greenhorn in a Changbai Mountain lumber camp. A tree falls on him and kills him, but when he wakes, his soul has been replaced by that of a visitor from a hundred years in the future. In the sturdy body of a sixteen-year-old from Shandong, he has the strength of an ox. The lead rafter, Shui Laogua, takes one look at him and says, “This kid was born for this work.”

On his first timber-rafting run, he faces 1,400 li of river on the Yalu, with eighty-one deadly passes. The rapids at Xiao Menkan slap him in the face, Old Evil Mouth is drenched by a torrential downpour, and submerged rocks at Gucao Duo jut up like teeth. Carrying an eight-jointed axe, Qu Shaoyang races across the slippery logs and drives his axe into a loose joint, wrenching the breaking raft back from the King of Hell by sheer force. Shui Laogua watches, dumbstruck.

At the inn in Tadianzi, a brothel girl tugs at his sleeve and offers to teach him for free how to “be a real man.” Qu Shaoyang pulls away. “I've seen more internet celebrities than there are trees in your town.” While the others sprawl on the kang, calculating their wages, he squats by the Mantianxing whistle post, staring at the dazzling stones on the riverbed as he narrows his eyes and thinks:

“If there's really gold down there, why keep rafting?”

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.