Life and Death, Love and Hate, a Game Within a Game

In the eighth year of Chongde, six-year-old Fulin witnessed the affair between his mother, Queen Zhuang, and his fourteenth uncle, Dorgon, on a rainy night, and made a vow to "take Dorgon's life." The novel breaks through the shackles of traditional historical narrative, using "drama" as the surface and "human anatomy" as the interior. It tells the story of how a young emperor changed from an avenger to a prisoner in the bloody storm of the Forbidden City, and ultimately became a tragic epic in feudal society. The story slowly unfolds an 18-year journey of grief and indignation in a life of revenge, carefully planned using multiple means such as chronic poison, psychological torture, and political encirclement and suppression.