In the winter of the eighth year of Zhenguan, King Gaochang cut off the Silk Road and secretly communicated with the Western Turks.
Thirty-nine-year-old Su Dingyuan, an advance soldier of the Anxi Army, received a secret order - not to carry a sword into battle, but to lay a net. A web that would take ten years to weave. He personally selected the 21-year-old Shen Mo and sent him to Loulan to serve as a hidden stake. The night before departure, two young men sat in a tavern outside Yumen Pass and drank a pot of bad wine. Shen Mo asked: "How long?" Su Dingyuan said: "As little as five years, as many as ten years."
Shen Mo left. From that day on, his name was Kang Mo, a Sogdian merchant from Samarkand. He buried a letter at the southern edge of Bailongdui. The letter said, "If you read this letter, it means that I failed to come back." Ten years later, he dug it out with his own hands and read it to his daughter who could not read Chinese characters - he was back. But what the price is, only he knows.
This is the prequel to "Capture the King in the Desert". It answers two questions: Why did Su Dingyuan become the old man with white beard and hair who said "I can't leave" in the main story? How did Shen Mo survive the ten years he spent in Loulan.
The blade enters the wild, one game every ten years. The first sword fell in Gaochang.
