In the winter of 1937, the night Shanghai fell. Post office clerk Chen Mo, an ordinary person who just wants to live a stable life, is involved in the whirlpool of fate because of his night shift. While repairing ventilation ducts, he accidentally eavesdropped on the Japanese army's top-secret "Thorn Plan" - a huge conspiracy aimed at completely strangling the resistance and plundering resources. The sound of the pen rolling down exposed him, and in an instant he was reduced from a night watchman to a "ghost" hunted by the Japanese army throughout the city.
Families were destroyed, and wanted posters were posted all over the streets. Chen Mo has nothing but the intelligence and survival instinct engraved in his mind. He has no guns, no backup, and no extraordinary skills. What he has is just the postman's familiarity with the city, the cunningness of the market, and the amazing observation and silent resilience tempered in desperate situations.
In order to keep the intelligence alive, he transformed into a "corpse collector" and placed silent warnings among the corpses in mass graves. He became a "mute cook" and burned the enemy's map into the scorch marks of scallion pancakes. He even pretended to be a "typhoid ghost" and used high fever babble to imitate Morse code to send fuzzy coordinates. Every pass is a dance with death, using flesh and blood as fuel. He saw the glimmer of light extinguished, experienced betrayal and sacrifice, and always refused to join any organization, only being a lonely "thorn".
Three years of being on the run, the pain was eroding the bones. When Chongqing finally received this blood-stained intelligence, Chen Mo had arrived at the destination - a mass grave heavily guarded by Japanese troops. He was seriously injured and had nowhere to escape. On the mottled wall of the abandoned quarantine facility, he used his last strength to carve a key that could not be understood by the enemy, and signed a line of small words: "I am the thorn."
