By the Banks of the Daling River

This is not a power fantasy. There are no wild flights of imagination and no System to give the protagonist a boost. It is a story about an ordinary man in history. Shen Dazhu, a farmer from Shandong, flees a drought and makes his way to Liaodong, where he is swept into the Ming army. Starting as a laborer building fortifications at Dalinghe City, he survives a brutal siege and countless brushes with death. Over more than a decade of fighting between the Ming and Qing, his astonishing resilience and battlefield instincts carry him from common soldier to a guerrilla general who can command an army on his own. But when the Ming army is finally defeated at the decisive Battle of Songjin and the empire teeters on the brink of collapse, he realizes that all his life's efforts have gone toward protecting nothing but a lonely city doomed to fall. This is the story of an ordinary man struggling to survive amid the tide of history, trying to find a shred of meaning, only to be crushed by his age in the end.