The sea breeze of the fifth year of the Apocalypse, carrying saltiness and despair, beat on the rocks of Shacheng. Lu Zhaoxi, a former concubine of the Imperial Academy, was once the number one scholar in the Jinluan Palace who scolded Fang Qiu, but now he has become a down-and-out scholar in this remote coastal town, making a living by writing letters for others. The imperial staff shattered not only his fame, but also his belief in the sage's book - until the Japanese pirate's speedboat cut across the sea level and put the butcher's knife on the necks of the people in Shacheng.
When the alarm bells tore through the dead silence and the officials huddled in the city, it was the knife of Su Mei, the tavern proprietress, and the blood of Chen Hu, the strong man of the people, that allowed this powerless scholar to see clearly the truth of the troubled times: the so-called "king's law" has long been decayed, and the so-called "imperial court" is far away. He climbed onto the rocks and deconstructed the war situation with his poetry-reading eyes; he boarded the fortune ship and commanded the artillery with the fragments of the "Arms and Preparations"; he wrote down the victory report, used the court rules to force back the greedy households, fought for a pension for the dead, and sought a glimmer of hope for the survivors.
The pier paved with fifty-eight corpses became his new "study". He no longer writes strategies, but records life and death in ledgers: the names of the deceased are engraved in the "book of life and death", and the merits and demerits of the living are recorded in the "merits and demerits grid". Every grain of grain and every piece of iron in Shacheng has become a "soldier" in his writings. The pen and ink of the past have turned into the "ink blade" that protects our homeland; the ideals of the past have taken a new shape in the blood and fire - not the empty words of "bringing peace to all generations", but to allow these fishermen, widows, and remnants of soldiers in front of us to survive the sound of tomorrow's tide.
