The year Si Yeheng turned thirty, a phone call dragged him back to his hometown in Hebei.
He thought he would only have to face a declining village and his aging parents. He had no idea he was stepping into an endgame that had been guarded for thousands of years. The Si family were not farmers, but guardians. For generations, they had used their fields as formations and their crops as medicine to tend the “earth veins” of the Central Plains.
Now the veins were “sick.” A bizarre force known as “Corrosion,” with the rusty, sweet stench of blood, was awakening deep beneath the ancestral fields. The soil had turned dark red, strange things were growing, and shadowy figures watched in silence through the fog. The methods passed down by his grandfather were on the verge of failing, while a doom of extinction hung over the village.
Si Yeheng, a direct descendant with little spiritual sensitivity who had spent ten years wasting away in the city, was forced to take up a bone shard that grew hot in his hand, a rotting book filled with taboos, a “demon-repelling plow” of unknown purpose, and an absurd mission: to use his modern knowledge to understand and heal this “sick” land.
When the flames of his probing stirred a piercing shriek underground, and the ancestral plowshare carved out a boundary that sealed in the strange fire, he knew there was no turning back.
Before the red fog swallowed the village whole, he had to learn to be a true “Minister of Agriculture” and read the land’s symptoms, then find the source of the corrosion.
In the silence, guard the veins and save lives.
