In the twenty-fourth year of Zhizheng, an extraordinary man blessed by fate arrives in a world torn apart by chaos. He is past forty, yet has the face of a young noble. He has no strength to kill a chicken, yet can bring the dead back to life. Amid the flames of war at the end of the Yuan dynasty, he turns barren villages into granaries with high-yield crops, makes pork a delicacy through castration, and repeatedly snatches the people upon whom the fate of the Ming dynasty depends from the clutches of death with his unfathomable medical skills.
He is Zhu Yuanzhang's beloved and detested “demon.” At court, he dares to provoke the Hongwu Emperor until Zhu Yuanzhang slams the table in fury. In private, Empress Ma calls him her younger brother, and Crown Prince Zhu Biao treats him as a kindred spirit. He saves Chang Yuchun, who should have died suddenly, changes the tragic fate of Zhu Wenzheng, the God of War of Hongdu, and, amid the blood-red dusk of the Hongwu era, drags one destined young hero after another back from the gates of the underworld, weaving a protective net that spans life and death.
As the world marvels that one renowned minister and veteran general after another, all “supposed to have died,” lives to a ripe old age, the deadly schemes of Jiangnan officials, the blades of the Northern Yuan remnants, and the hidden arrows of the White Lotus Sect all come for him. This figure, forever twenty-five, is quietly laying out another great game in the shadows of the empire. He seeks no title or high office, only a different kind of Huaxia. And history begins to turn quietly on the rainy night he saves Empress Ma.
