Northeast Tales: Snow Hunting in Ice City

Winter, 1986. Harbin.

Nineteen-year-old Wan Hongjun has finally landed a secure job, becoming a permanent security guard at a state-owned machine tool factory. The boy, raised in a hunter’s family deep in the mountains, thinks he has found the key to a stable life.

Then, one snowy night, he catches a gang of thugs stealing supplies from the factory grounds.

The ink on the commendation notice has barely dried when a cold blade presses against his throat. Behind the thugs stands Brother Snake, a crime boss who rules the Daowai district. His superiors tell him to back down, and his family begs him to endure it. But all that gets them is his sister’s house smashed up, his brother-in-law beaten, and an elderly relative hospitalized from the shock.

In the mountains, his father once taught him: “When a wolf comes, if you don’t kill it, it’ll bite your whole family to death.”

On his hospital bed, Wan Hongjun reaches for his woodcutter’s knife.

In a bloody fight at a billiards hall, he takes down more than a dozen men on his own. But at the final moment, Brother Snake points a sawed-off shotgun at his head. As the gun fires, the knife Wan Hongjun throws happens by sheer chance to pierce his enemy’s throat.

“Excessive self-defense. Three years and six months.”

When the court delivers its verdict, Wan Hongjun knows that the hunter’s son who believed “If you don’t provoke me, I won’t provoke you” died in the winter of 1986.

The iron gates of Provincial Prison No. 2 slam shut behind him. There is no law here, only the naked law of the jungle. The prison king’s abuse, covert schemes, Scarface’s revenge... every step is a matter of life and death.

Until he meets old hand Wu Tiancheng.

This is not the rise of an underworld boss. It is the brutal coming-of-age story of an ordinary boy in an era when the rules have collapsed, forced to draw his knife to protect the last warmth in his heart, and ultimately learning to dance with wolves.

1986. Snow and wind blanket the land. A blade frozen by fate begins to awaken.