In the autumn of 1937, amid the smoke of the fall of Peiping, Rao Le, a top student in the History Department of Yenching University, witnessed the Japanese army brutally murdering pregnant women in the street, which completely shattered his fantasy of "academic salvation of the nation." When his father was shot dead by the Japanese army to protect the cultural relics of the Forbidden City, and his mother set herself on fire to protect her students, this gentle scholar gave up writing and formed a special operations team called the "Literary Foxes" with the help of his childhood sweetheart, medical student Lin Wangshu. From outsmarting the Japanese army's biochemical laboratory to deciphering the "Tiger Force" secret messages, from escorting international journalists to reveal the truth about Nanjing to instigating rebellion against senior Manchukuo officials, this team of intellectuals and martyrdom weaved a secret resistance network in Peking, Shanghai and Chongqing. With the successive intervention of the Kuomintang special commissioner code-named "Hanmei" and the Yan'an "Red Feng" Special Branch, Rao Le, who is in a game of multiple identities, gradually discovers that the real war is not only between guns and cannons, but also in the undercurrent of people's opposition. When the dawn of 1945 dawned, Rao Le stood in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City with scars all over his body, holding in his hand the broken pages of the catalog of his father's cultural relics burned by the Japanese army, and finally understood the ultimate meaning of protecting civilization.
