The wasteland after the nuclear blasts lies beneath a sun-blocking sky of leaden clouds. Chen Tieshan is a half-mechanical technician with only his brain left. Dragging an iron body with four arms and twenty fingers, he struggles through a radioactive hell. His family was torn apart by the blasts: his wife, Lin Wei, became the Holy Mother of the Kindling Faith, igniting belief with her theory of evolution through serum; his youngest daughter, Niuniu, became a holy child of the faith, shut away behind the towering walls of theocracy; and his eldest daughter, Xiaoyun, is missing, her fate unknown. His only comfort is Ironclaw, the mechanical war leopard he saved with his own hands.
To find his family and save his daughter, Chen Tieshan turns the dying girl Lin Xiaoyu into his mechanical adopted daughter. He drives the iron carriage Iron Steed, carrying Ironclaw and Xiaoyu into the eye of the wasteland storm. Five powers carve up the land and fight among themselves:
The Kindling Faith: blazing across the plains, led by Lin Wei
The Iron Scorpion Legion: cornered beasts of the Angry Tides
The Brotherhood: an iron flood
The Yanggu Ironwall Alliance: baptized in blood
The Bunker Purge Force: cold and ruthless
Armed with the skills of a master craftsman, Chen Tieshan maneuvers among the fangs of every faction. He seeks not only to reunite his shattered family, but also the “Rat God’s Medicine,” derived from field mice: the last hope of resisting radiation and saving all living things. Family ties tear through the barriers of faith, while steel collides with the tide of evolution. In this desperate apocalypse, can a mechanic carve a path to survival for humanity with his hands of steel?
The logic is clear and the details fit perfectly, unlike some books that are all wrong.