In 1931, deep in the mountains of southwestern China, a sixteen-year-old country girl Yingzi was kidnapped by the bandit Scar Qi, and she fell into a bloody whirlpool ever since. In the bandit village of Qiyao Mountain, she was forced to give birth to the son of the bandit leader, but with her herbal wisdom and cold nature, she managed to survive amidst the presence of wolves. A poison-soaked brocade quilt, a red silk dagger wrapped in a shroud, and a blood-stained "Communist Manifesto" became her sharp blades to tear apart the troubled times.
In the Zhongyi Hall of the Bandit Village, the struggle for power is like poisonous ivy: Scar Qi's old epilepsy disease hides murderous intent, the mirror box of the second boss is aimed at her pregnant belly, and the secret message from the Salt Gang's cavalry threatens the Japanese conspiracy. The swaddling baby with "seven stars on its feet" is not only the talisman for her to gain a foothold in the bandit village, but also the "destiny" pawn that all forces compete for. When the Red Army Salt Brigade brought sulfonamide drugs and revolutionary fire, and when the private school teacher who had been missing for ten years reappeared as Ma Guotou, the female bandit leader known as the "Empress of the Big Dipper" had to make a choice between the coffin of the old world and the cry of the new life - use datura poison to water power, or use the midwife's silver needle to sew broken mountains and rivers?
This book uses the Ancient Tea Horse Road as its latitude and longitude, and grains of salt and bullets as its pen and ink, to outline a bloody and majestic picture of banditry in the Southwest. Here are the barbaric carnivals of bandits gambling for their lives, the revolutionary secret words hidden in the Salt Gang's "Horse Horse Tune", and the tragic torn between banditry, motherhood and humanity among women in troubled times. When the seven-star birthmark meets the red five-pointed star, when the black coffin in the ancestral hall hits the dawn of Yan'an, a woman who has been crushed and reshaped by fate will eventually carve out her own way of life in the game of life and death.
