A single grain of moldy millet fed four hundred thousand blades, and a severed finger knocked on the gates of a peaceful age.
Wei Liao, a history student, woke up as a conscript in the state of Qin.
The grain cart he was pushing was headed for the battlefield at Changping, where Bai Qi had already dug a massive pit to bury four hundred thousand Zhao soldiers.
“In troubled times, an ant like me just needs to stay alive.” He hugged his moldy ration cake and kept his head down as he pushed.
Until the chaos of war crushed every illusion:
A collapse buried him alive, and a military clerk recorded him as “one body filling a ditch, credit toward an enemy’s head.”
He collapsed from exhaustion on the grain road, and the escorting soldiers cut his rope and tossed him aside like trash.
The granaries at Danshui were piled high with moldy grain, while the storehouse officials stole millet and laughed as they feasted on meat stew.
When the noose of history tightened around his neck, Wei Liao shattered his old creed of mere survival:
“If I bear the bloodline of old Qin in this body, then with my soul I shall set these ten thousand miles of rivers and mountains right!”
With a charcoal pencil, he drafted a plan on the back of the grain ledger to burn down the bloodthirsty system of military ranks and rewards.
On a snowy night at Hangu Pass, he led the routed soldiers of the “Ditch-Filling Battalion” and turned the tide of a crisis threatening the entire nation.
He claimed the sword Bai Qi had given him, melted down the weapons of the Six States, and forged the Nine Tripods of “a world where all can eat their fill”!
From a beast on two legs hauling grain to the new founder of the Nine Tripods in the Xianyang palace,
he crossed the Longxi road, strewn with starving corpses,
he bore the moonlit Danshui and the souls of four hundred thousand dead,
and in the end forged a nation of wolves and tigers into a peaceful age.
“The Tyrannical Qin? No. I’ll make it the backbone that upholds peace for all ages!”
