When Lin Feng’s fingertips first touched the sparks produced by flint rubbing against wood, he thought it was just another excessively vivid dream. In it, he was a frail young man named “A Mu” from a tribe on the ice plains. Hunger stabbed at his stomach like a knife, the chilblains on his palms seeped blood, and the wind and snow outside the cave carried the howls of wolves, threatening to drag the entire tribe into the abyss.
He did not know that the hunts, fire-making, and mysterious exchanges with the shaman A Gu that he experienced in his sleep were real fragments of life on an ancient land. Nor did he know that the crescent-shaped birthmark on his left wrist had already bound his soul firmly to a primitive man from three thousand years ago.
When the tribe in his dreams was on the verge of starving to death after heavy snow blocked the mountain passes, the same hunger seized him in the real world. Half asleep and half awake, he directed “A Mu” to chisel through ice and catch fish, and to tame the fire. At last, the dreamlike illusion cracked, revealing the truth. The engraved animal bone handed to him by the tribal shaman A Gu was actually lying beside his pillow when he woke. The door to his soul-space had opened.
A space of ten square meters became a bridge connecting two eras. The packet of salt he brought back taught the tribe the meaning of “flavor.” The lighter he took with him was revered as “the fire of the gods.” And the ancient herbs he brought back cured a strange illness that modern medicine was powerless to treat.
But survival on the ice plains was never just about having enough to eat and stay warm. The snow wolf king’s fangs gleamed in the night; the stone spears of rival tribes pointed at the cave entrance; and the bronze fragment hidden in the sleeve of the shaman A Gu recorded a terrifying secret about “sacrifice” and “reincarnation.” When Lin Feng learned to draw his first shamanic rune in his dream
