In 1958, in the Anshan Iron and Steel family area, seven teenagers became sworn brothers in an abandoned boiler room during the famine years. A flick of hair became their code for "slanted bangs", a vow to "scatter is like ashes in the sky, gather is like the setting sun's fire", and they made a ten-year agreement.
1968, The educated youth spot in northern Shaanxi. The once young Zhou Mu has been smoothed by life, but he is cornered by his old enemy. He threw out his trademark slanted bangs - a fight that was meant to protect himself actually caused six people who had been separated for ten years to rush to help from the border, the capital, the corps, the factory, and the village at night.
From the industrial towns in the northeast to the deep mountains of the southwest, from the Great Northern Wilderness to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, they cast their ten years of youth in steel, buried them in rubber forests, and hid them deep in the frozen soil. When the spring tide of reform and opening up surges, the street boys of the past have become engineers, entrepreneurs, scholars, grassroots cadres... And the trust that started in the boiler room is still their only constant coordinate in the turbulent era.
This is not the history of one person's struggle, but the story of how a generation rebuilds from brokenness, reunites from separation, and protects small friendships in a grand narrative. When the setting sun shines again, they will finally understand: it is never the sun that lights up the road ahead, but the never-extinguished fire in each other's eyes.
