In 2089, when Qin's interstellar colonization plan entered the final countdown, its old enemy Dwarf State launched a long-planned raid under the control of Li State. The coastal cities were reduced to seas of fire, but the elites of the Qin State had already gone on an expedition with the starships - the remaining 800 soldiers commanded an army of millions of intelligent machines to keep the war at bay.
Air and space commander Long Yun, mechanical army commander Zhang Huai, submarine beast army commander Tang Yan, and intelligent army commander Cheng Anwei were ordered to go on a cross-sea expedition with Zhou's millions of reinforcements. From tropical jungles to extremely cold ice fields, they not only have to fight against crazy and stubborn enemy forces, but also face the cruelest moral choice in war: whether to shoot brainwashed children? How to deal with prisoners of war who sincerely repent? Is justice still justice when justice requires fighting?
Zhang Huai insisted on the principle of "punishing the crime rather than the ethnic group" and clashed fiercely with Lin Xiong, the Zhou general who advocated "blood debt repayment with blood". When the war was finally won, the trials of the East Asian War Tribunal triggered a more profound debate: Should evil deeds deserve equal punishment, or are reformation and redemption equally important? Is the death penalty a manifestation of justice or a simple relief?
After the war, with trauma and reflection, Zhang Huai joined humanity's first extra-system colonization plan and went to Zijin Planet to establish a new civilization. There, can humanity break the cycle of hatred? When encountering younger interstellar civilizations, will they repeat the mistakes of colonization or find a new way to coexist?
This is a hard-core science fiction that spans three hundred years of war, trial, and interstellar colonization. It is also a profound inquiry into the nature of human nature.
It is the evil of human nature; what is eliminated is not only the evil of the system, but also the greatest threat to the survival of civilization.
