The final years of the Han dynasty. Huangtu Village, Lujiang Commandery. Nine-year-old orphan Chen Jin walks barefoot over frost-covered ground and meets a white deer that has been waiting for him for twelve years. The deer teaches him his first book: Listening. Listen to the snow falling, the grass roots stirring, and the massacre of a city about to begin eighty li away. A celestial connection falls into the earth, and what grows from it is a human, not a god.
