At the end of the Northern Wei Dynasty, wars in six towns tore the empire apart. In the furnace of blood and fire, two heroes emerged:
Gao Huan, a poor scholar from Huaishuo, is as bold and unrestrained as a fierce horse. He rose to prominence with the help of Chihurzhurong, but was trapped in a whirlpool of power. He understands the weakness of human nature and can be affectionate but also cruel. With the vigilance and iron-fisted assistance of his wife Lou Zhaojun, who said "wolves eat meat and lambs eat grass", he split the soil of the Eastern Wei Dynasty in troubled times and was granted the title of King of Bohai. The poisonous oath under Yubi City and the fury of revenge in Mang Mountain cannot escape the hero's end, leaving only the regret of "regret that we have not seen Luoyang Peony together".
Yu Wentai, a soldier of Wuchuan Army, is as disciplined as ice. The trauma of the war gave him "laughter syndrome" and forged an iron will. Embracing the ideal of "imitating Zhou rites and practicing great harmony", he united Guanlong with the reform of the military system and established the Western Wei Dynasty to compete with Gao Huan. The fire of the reeds in the sand garden devoured 200,000 enemy troops, which was a chess game in which he coldly abandoned his son; when he tied his hair for his wife late at night, he whispered "I would like to see the flowers of Chang'an together", which was the only remaining tenderness under the iron blood. He personally planted the mulberry tree symbolizing the New Deal, but it was difficult to resist the tide of the times.
The two heroes competed across the Yellow River: the sand garden and the sea of fire, the bloodshed on the river bridge, the fierce battle on the Mang Mountain, the fortified city with jade... Every collision reshaped the northern territory. Between the power and the blade, Lou Zhaojun sat firmly in Jinyang with wisdom and balanced Hu and Han; Princess Feng Yi melted the ice with warmth; Yang Jian quietly accumulated money in the shadow of his father's generation and finally became a world-beating chess player.
This is not a simple dynasty change, but a cruel confrontation between ideals (Yu Wentai's Zhouli Datong) and reality (Yang Jian's centralized empire), a fierce collision between Hu Feng and Han Dynasty, and a majestic epic in which heroes and the times shape each other.
