He was once a healer who saved lives, but a world that devoured its people drove him to become a rebel.
When he was ten, he found a moldy ear of wheat by the Yellow River. He carried it with him for the rest of his life.
His father was killed by a local tyrant, and his dying mother entrusted him with a jade bracelet. He wandered for twelve years, witnessing parents forced to eat their own children, old craftsmen worked to death beneath monuments to merit, and people starving while the government granaries stayed shut. In the Taihang Mountains, he dug a grave with his bare hands until his fingers bled, and found the complete text of the Book of Great Peace.
Thirty years later, standing on a high platform, he roared those sixteen words:
"The Azure Heaven is dead; the Yellow Heaven shall rise! When the year is Jiazi, all under Heaven shall know great fortune!"
Eight provinces erupted in rebellion, and the whole realm was shaken.
But this road led to mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.
One of his younger brothers died in a sea of flames. The other died on the executioner's block.
His wife used that book knife to cut off his head, then smiled as she plunged it into her own chest.
His disciple carried the pottery urn containing his head through the Taihang Mountains for seven days and seven nights.
He lost. But he said:
"The Azure Heaven can be shouted to death."
Eighteen hundred years later, a temporary worker named Zhang Sansan was struck by those words.
At his computer, he typed three hundred thousand words and brought that man back.
As for what sort of man he was...
A demonic rebel, a hero, a madman, a sage, a failure, a man who would not kneel...
See for yourself.
This book is not just about Zhang Jiao. It also writes about how the official history used the word "demon thief" to send someone away, how folk used folk songs and nursery rhymes to remember a person, how Chen Shou wrote in a private manuscript "Those who come after you, if you see peace, don't forget Zhang Jiao", how Zhang Zhongjing accepted the broken talisman and the medical book, how Zhuge Liang treasured the fragment of "Everyone has his own strength", and how Zhang Sansan typed out 300,000 words in front of the computer to "return" that person.