Sparks in the Turbid Waves

In the autumn of 1938, the small city of Tanzhou on the middle reaches of the Yangtze became a war-scorched no-man's land caught between the lines. Japanese troops occupied it in force, the Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime clung to power, and our organization operated covertly underground, while the city's people struggled to survive amid shellfire, hunger, and betrayal.

Chen Shouyi, a dockworker, had only wanted to survive with his paralyzed mother and his younger brother, crippled after being forcibly conscripted by the Japanese. But after an accident drew him into the transport of supplies for our side, he was forced to become an underground courier. He had seen the Japanese burn, kill, and loot, and had also witnessed suspicion and infighting among “our own.” His childhood friend Zhou Zhengming, also a dockworker, defected to the Japanese and became a lackey of their secret police. Within our organization, hardliners and moderates argued endlessly over whether civilians should be sacrificed to complete their mission. And the identity of “Cormorant,” our undercover agent inside the Japanese forces, was unknown even to the organization's leaders.

The city's divisions were everywhere. Shopkeepers delivered supplies to the Japanese while secretly passing intelligence to our side. A schoolteacher was ordered by the Japanese to teach Japanese in class, yet turned around that night and told the children the story of Yue Fei. Chen Shouyi's mother would rather starve than eat the “relief rations” distributed by the Japanese, but when his younger brother fell gravely ill, she knelt and begged him to stop seeing “dangerous people.”

Through mission after mission and betrayal after betrayal, Chen Shouyi gradually realized that the little man who had once lived only for his family could not survive alone. He watched the people around him fall one by one: a cart driver carrying intelligence was beaten to death by the Japanese, the liaison who had sheltered him swallowed a bullet and killed himself, and even his childhood friend Zhou Zhengming, at the very last moment, tried to save him...