When she was ten, Mongol cavalry trampled her home, and her mother’s blood splashed across her face.
Kneeling before her mother’s grave, Ran Yuniang swore: “If I fail to avenge this, may every descendant of the Ran family die a miserable death.”
From then on, a fearless girl appeared on Qingju Mountain. She wielded iron hammers, forged the Qingshuang blade, and led the people’s militia in battles that made the enemy tremble. When the authorities offered amnesty, she kept their envoy trapped in the mountains for three days and nights. When Yu Jie arrived in person, she watched coldly from atop the stockade walls.
Then a hotheaded young man named Zhang Jue barged into her world. The moment they fought back to back, her heart went astray.
At eighteen, she led her clan in surrender and entered Diaoyu Castle. At thirty-two, her father died fighting on the walls, and she took up his hammer. At fifty-two, on the eve of the castle’s fall, she stood against the wall with more than ten arrows in her body, the Qingshuang blade buried deep in an enemy general’s shoulder blade.
“Tell your sister... the jade may be shattered... but the bones remain.”
She defended this castle for fifty-two years, from girlhood to white hair, from black tresses to bare bones.
Diaoyu Castle, where God broke his whip.
Ran Yuniang, the woman who defended the city.
