The fifty years of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms are a ruined silk scroll soaked in blood, fire, and tears. It was an age when order had utterly collapsed, ritual and music were lost, and benevolence and righteousness had vanished. Human life was as cheap as the grass outside a military camp. Yesterday's nobles might become today's ghosts beneath the blade or prisoners in the dungeon. Heaven and earth conspired against the people, too: rivers burst their banks in fury, locusts and droughts struck year after year, and roads were strewn with the starving dead. People even resorted to eating one another. Amid these chaotic ruins, survival was the only morality, and force the ultimate language. And I arrived here with a suitcase full of textbooks, determined to make my mark.
