A Family of Loyal Heroes? My Father Is the Turkic God of War!

In the nineteenth year of Zhenguan, the young general Xue Rengui, clad in white, secures victory at Tianshan with three arrows. At the victory banquet in Chang'an, a bloodstained imperial decree bearing the words “Dragon-Sundering” is discovered at the bottom of a gilded oath vessel. When the Turkic delegation is found dead by the Wei River, the fragment of a vessel clutched in their hands fits perfectly with the ceremonial vessel used for Li Shimin's “Pact by the Wei” twenty years earlier! Impeachment memorials flood the Censorate, and rumors sweep Chang'an: the loyal general famed throughout Liaodong is secretly revered by the Turkic wolf cavalry as the “War God of the Northern Desert”! Xue Dingshan grips half of a Fish Intestine Sword, its tip pointed toward nothing but mysteries. The “Star Chart” his mother, Liu Yingchun, burned before her death concealed a brocade code revealing Goguryeo's defenses. The Sogdian numerals engraved on the base of the drunk Cheng Yaojin's wine gourd form an intelligence network spanning the Silk Road. And the wolf-head tattoo on his father Xue Rengui's left arm is identical to the totem of the Turkic Khan's family! When poisoned wine seeps into the nine-curved golden cup at a night banquet in Daming Palace, and Tang soldiers listed as “fallen in battle” are turned into Turkic death warriors, a single “Dragon-Sundering Secret Order” reveals a world-shaking plot. The submerged sword in the Wei River, the poisonous plants of the hot springs in Tingzhou, even the hour of Emperor Taizong's death: all are lethal moves in a game of chess! The meritorious official Cheng Yaojin, whose portrait hangs in Lingyan Pavilion, is actually a double agent. A maid of Princess Wencheng carries a military map of Tibet, while Sogdian caravans pass messages in wine barrels... When Xue Dingshan holds the Fish Intestine Sword his father sank into the Wei River, and the sundial on its hilt points toward Hanyuan Hall in Daming Palace, a bloody spy war spanning thirty years finally erupts. Who is protecting this golden age, and who is raising wolves? And beneath the golden plaque proclaiming “A Family of Loyal Heroes,” how many blood-soaked feats lie buried, never to be spoken of?