The wind in the fifth year of the Apocalypse rolled up gravel and smashed the fame and dignity of Gu Chuan, the editor of the Hanlin Academy, into the Liangzhou Guard nine thousand miles away. The impeachment memorial against the prime minister resulted in the charge of "making trouble by speaking nonsense." The shackles wore off his pen-holding hand, and among the ruins of this penal colony, there were only prisoners waiting to die and cannibalistic sand.
He was once the Tanhua Lang who scolded Fang Qiu in the Jinluan Palace, but now he had to confront the gangsters for a piece of clean water. When alum's method of purifying water allowed him to gain a foothold in a desperate situation, and when the broken pages of "Treatise on Febrile and Miscellaneous Diseases" became a life-saving prescription, this frail scholar finally understood: The books of sages cannot save troubled times, but if used in the right place, pen and ink can also be used as a sword.
He taught the prisoners to build walls with rammed earth, exchanged work points for food, and erected wooden signs with rules on the ruins; he asked the blacksmith to rekindle the furnace, forge scrap copper and iron into caltrops and spears, and build a human wall in front of the horse bandits' scimitars. But the most difficult thing to tame is never the wind and sand of the Gobi - the suspicion of the bandit leader He Tianxiong, the fangs of the ruthless bandit Li Hu, the covetousness of the sand wolf son and horse bandit, and the wildness tempered by suffering are all tearing at the order he has stitched together with knowledge and belief.
When the roar of the trebuchet tore through the night sky, and when the blood on the city wall dyed the setting sun red, Gu Chuan watched the prisoners who were once as numb as zombies raise their weapons, and suddenly understood: the so-called desperate situation is never the end of fate. The struggle of one scholar may not be able to protect a country thousands of miles away, but it can build a wall called "survive" for three hundred desperate souls in this forgotten land.
