“The greatest act of loyalty to the court is simply to stay alive.”
That was the principle my father believed in all his life.
Until the winter of Chongzhen's second year, when he froze to death in a ravine strewn with rocks in Song County, still clutching a notice for unpaid grain tax.
That day, my mother swallowed shards of pottery and gave her life back to this cruel world.
From then on, the world lost an honest farmer called Kaiwazi and gained a rebel as hard as stone: Fu Shitou.
This is not merely a story about rebellion. It is a firsthand account of how the displaced people of the Great Ming fought to survive.
We have no divine reinforcements descending from the heavens, no System cheats.
We face drought-cracked yellow earth, locusts swarming like dark clouds, brutal officials, and the most extreme hunger and madness buried in human nature.
I followed that Shaanxi man called Li Zicheng, crawling out of piles of corpses in the Shangluo Mountains. We fought our way through Henan, through Tongguan, and all the way to the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing.
We sought neither riches nor noble titles.
We only wanted to ask the emperor, high above us:
“When the common people starve to death, is that truly the way of heaven?”
If it is, then we will tear heaven apart!
The characters are vivid and lifelike!