The Celestial Artificer’s Eclipse

In Handan, near the end of the Warring States period, three precocious boys huddled together in the residence for royal hostages: Ying Zheng, who never forgot a thing he read; Wang Ben, a wolf who had yet to be tamed; and Meng Tian, keenly attuned to the ways of the world. When an escape on a snowy night forged their fates together, no one could have imagined that the frozen sand table would become, twenty years later, a battle map ablaze across the land of Huaxia.

From the bloody coronation at Qinian Palace to the deadly salt-and-iron struggle in Xinzheng, from the dragon-bone divinations of Yunmeng Marsh to the ash-buried relics of Linzi, Ying Zheng and his closest friends reinvent the rules of war with astonishing ingenuity. They use fluctuations in salt prices to destroy Han's ironmaking lifeline, harness star-pattern steel technology to unravel Chu's witchcraft, and deploy ice-doll tactics to tear open the wounds of Yan's childhood. Yet the shadow of the mysterious artisan Qing He is always there. Her life-risking art of engraving star patterns is both the ultimate weapon for conquering the Six States and the last spark of civilization amid the book-burning catastrophe.

When Wang Ben discovers a star-pattern steel chest containing miniature books aboard Xu Fu's fleet sailing east, when Meng Tian secretly keeps the teachings of the Hundred Schools inscribed on a bronze tree in Mount Li's underground palace, and when the dying emperor clutches half a frozen millet cake, Ying Zheng, at the height of his power, finally sees the truth: the childhood vows forged into weapons, the glimmer of humanity cast into books, and the grains of thought sunk beneath the Eastern Sea are all closer to eternity than the words “Mandate of Heaven” engraved on the Heirloom Seal of the Realm.