The Blade That Guards the Realm

In the second year of the Chongzhen reign, a freezing wind whipped grains of snow against the walls of Ningyuan. Lin Fu, a low-ranking border soldier, wrapped himself in a uniform with its cotton stuffing poking through and tightened his grip on a chipped saber. Below the walls thundered the Later Jin cavalry. Above them, his brothers in arms, who had gone three days without food, stared with feverish eyes. He had only wanted to muddle through these troubled times, but during a retreat, he came across Qiuxue, an orphaned girl pursued by mutinous soldiers. Amid the flash of blades, for the first time he gripped his saber not to save his own life, but to protect someone else.

From Ningyuan to Shanhaiguan, from royalist troops to the commander of a refugee army, Lin Fu led a band of starving border soldiers, miners, and refugees as they fought their way through the Later Jin cavalry and the suspicions of the imperial army. He had seen his bravest brothers fall beneath the blades of their own men, the most chaste women endure humiliation for their people, and the court revel in luxury while bones littered the borderlands.

Qiuxue’s composure, Hongmei’s fiery spirit, Mengqin’s schemes, and Lingyan’s courage became four beacons in his life of blood and fire. He armed his cavalry with captured Later Jin warhorses, blew open city walls with miners’ explosives, and used the gentry’s granaries to feed the refugees. Through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, he forged a scattered band of soldiers into the “Army of the North.”

When news arrived that Chongzhen had hanged himself at Coal Hill, Lin Fu stood beside the Yellow River. Behind him were hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians clamoring for food; before him were Dorgon’s Eight Banners and the remnants of Li Zicheng’s forces. He drew his chipped saber, its bloodstains reflecting the setting sun. “If we don’t protect this Han realm, who will?”

From border soldier to founding emperor, he spent twenty years at war proving to the world that the Han people have always had iron in their bones.