This is the story of a complex man who was at once a butcher and a loving father, a powerful minister and a loyal friend, a reformer and a tyrant.
Shi Huaiyi, son of Shi Wansui and brother-in-law to Yang Guang, was a valiant young man skilled with the horse spear. Deeply calculating, he never let his emotions show. He could decide a man’s fate with a casual conversation at court, then sit beneath the moon and drink alongside his soldiers. He could refuse bribes and punish corruption, yet also enjoy the pomp of a thirty-two-man sedan chair.
He personally helped Yang Guang ascend the throne, then watched his boyhood friend descend into tyranny and ruin. He learned his first lesson in power through his father’s blood, sharpened his fangs amid the clans’ attempts to destroy him, and raised the “Army of Those Who Beg to Live” from the mountains of corpses and seas of blood of an age of chaos. This force, born with death as its only fate, would ultimately become his weapon for sweeping across the realm.
This is not a wish-fulfillment story about a “transmigrator using modern knowledge to crush the past.” Every victory here is built on flesh and blood; every political scheme is a gamble with life itself. The Guanzhong aristocracy, the Shandong clans, the emperor’s suspicions, brothers turning against one another: he faces an age that devours people.
