In the 17th year of Chongzhen's reign, Lu Zhaoyuan, a scholar in Jiading, lost his family in the city and died. When the shadow of the flying fish suit crushed the scholarly family, and when the ink fragrance of the sage's book was mixed with the smell of blood, he kept company with rats and insects in the culverts of Kunshan City, fought for his life with stones in the firelight of mass graves, used the strategies of "Sun Tzu's Art of War" to ambush his pursuers, and used the wisdom of "Essential Art of Elevating the People" to identify herbal medicines.
At the rupture of the world, he and Zhao Tieshan, a deserter from Liaodong, staged a "wolf and misfortune" game: he won trust with his determination to burn family letters, intercepted and killed grain-stealing rats with the knowledge of surveying, and carved a bloody surrender on the edge of conscience and survival. From an imperial criminal evading arrest to a "righteous bandit" planning to rob a village, he witnessed the tragic situation of refugees exchanging their children for food, experienced the darkness of official circles borrowing food to enrich themselves, and even understood the weight of the word "national subjugation" amidst the artillery fire on the city wall. This diary of troubled times, soaked in blood and ink, describes how a scholar forged a collection of classics and history into a knife for survival. When the dynasty was in decline, amidst the torn apart of scholarly bones and calamity, he wrote biographies of lonely ministers who were neither loyal nor traitors, just to survive.
