A crimson light appears over Dangshan, and a black dragon rises from the Bian River. In the chaotic final years of the Tang Dynasty, with famine victims strewn across the land, Zhu Wen is a ruffian foretold to “rise to nobility at thirty, yet die poor at fifty.” From a fierce general under Huang Chao to a “loyal and complete” servant of the Tang court, he ultimately dons the imperial robes and buries the three-hundred-year-old dynasty with his own hands. He welcomes counsel and urges the people to farm and raise silkworms, yet also murders emperors and massacres cities; at the White Horse Post, he casts the pure into the turbid. He trusts his advisers and cherishes his old followers, yet is suspicious and brutal, sleeping with a blade beside him. Secrets from unofficial histories intertwine with the flashes of blades in the official record: a beggar's gift of a bowl conceals an imperial prophecy, the Tianyou Blade rings to warn of a coming slaughter, Mani sorcery fuels his ambition to usurp the throne, and underground treasures bury the riddle of a dynasty's rise and fall. This is the brutal tearing of a generation's warlord between humanity and ambition, and an epic of a soul caught in an age of chaos, betraying everything only to be betrayed by fate beneath a blood-red setting sun.
