In 980 BCE, at Mengjin Ford on the roaring Yellow River, in what is now Mengjin District, Luoyang, Henan, the royal carriage of King Zhao of Zhou capsizes during his southern campaign. The turbid waves swallow the Son of Heaven’s crown. Also sinking to the riverbed is a name cursed by the laws of the clan: Ji Yao, King Zhao’s twin younger brother, branded an “ill-omened star.”
In the icy river, a completely different soul struggles awake. Zhou Ji, a modern gambler and con man who sank beneath Victoria Harbour after a financial empire collapsed, discovers that he has taken the place of the drowned man. He inherits a fief of just fifty li of saline wasteland and more than a hundred refugees struggling to survive. Awaiting him are the bloodstained bronze halberd of Commandant Ji Chou, the numb, despairing faces of the refugees, and the deadly noose of “twins bring misfortune” under the rigid hierarchy of the Western Zhou.
There is no god-given System, no script that reveals the future. Zhou Ji’s only advantages are the cold calculations he learned amid Wall Street’s ruins, scattered fragments of modern science, and a will to survive harder than bronze. He discovers that beneath the saline wasteland lie remnants of the Shang people, keepers of the secret art of “arsenic bronze,” a forbidden craft of astonishing hardness that comes at the cost of the artisans’ lives. He smells opportunity, and an even stronger scent of blood.
And so Wall Street’s fraud tactics play out in the Bronze Age:
He uses river mud, lime, and lies to erect a concrete monument falsely attributed to the “Great Yu’s ban on weapons.” He detonates phosphate rock and marsh gas to stage a stunning fraud, making it seem that divine punishment has melted weapons and cowing the greedy envoys of Jin.
He mixes the toxic remnants of arsenic bronze with nitrate ore, the strange “white frost” of a shadowed valley in Mount Mang, beneath the divine monument...
