When the first flame rises beneath the night sky over Heishi Village, Yan Xiao knows he has embarked on a bloody path with no return. The soul of a modern street thug falls into the body of a barbarian tribesman. He uses a lighter to kindle faith, and ambition along with it.
Adversity presses down like an iron curtain: primitive Stone Age tribes, the spells of shamans and the chieftain’s scepter, scarce salt wells, and the struggle to survive. He has no gods to protect him, yet he wields salt like a blade, cleaves through chaos, and forges the first copper coin, shaking an order unchanged for a thousand years. Then change comes quietly: wolf cavalry tears down the barriers of the old world, bronze furnaces illuminate the dark valleys, and the fire he lit with his own hands begins to consume both faith and humanity. The price spreads in silence: the shamans fall, but new idols take root in people’s hearts; the enemies submit, but loyalty begins to corrode; technology leaps forward, while a staircase of flesh and blood forms beneath it.
He is Yan Xiao, the tyrant of the ancient kingdom of Yelang, and an alchemist of civilization. From salt wells to war elephants, from wolf cavalry to warships, he single-handedly propels his tribe to the heights of empire. Yet when he looks back from the summit of power, all he sees beneath his feet is ash and bone. After faking his death and slipping away, he secretly sends a colonial fleet toward an unknown continent. Beyond that distant horizon, could there still be a new world untouched by bloodshed?
When institutions become shackles and technology turns into a blade of slaughter, how can humanity hold on to its last vestige of conscience amid the flames of its rise?
