During the Guangxu period, the first railway in Lingnan mysteriously collapsed during the commissioning ceremony. Chief engineer Chen Du picked up a heated road spike from the wreckage and half a freight bill pointing to the Yunnan mine - this was the last clue before his father disappeared.
He was exiled to the Dongchuan Copper Mine in the southwest border. Here, the government, chieftains, and mining lords are divided into three parts. The miners are like ants, coughing up blood and dying in the dark "copper prison". Chen Du discovered that deep in this life-devouring mine were buried the secrets of the mine tunnels of the Ming Dynasty, the former Qing Dynasty imperial envoys, and a kind of "exotic ore" that could generate heat by itself and be astonishingly hard. What made him even more shuddered was that all the clues pointed to the legendary miner Shen Wenzong who "died of a sudden illness" here twenty years ago, and that man was his father's close friend.
The difficult exploration of a generation of technicians in the dark: how to stay awake in a rotten system, preserve the fire in a desperate situation, and, surrounded by foreign powers, forge a real industrial backbone for a poor and weak China.
