After transmigrating, Lin Muzhi finds himself in a living hell: Yangzhou has fallen, and the Qing army is slaughtering the city for ten days, leaving corpses strewn everywhere. He is a history teacher, learned in the classics, yet he cannot save a single person about to die before his eyes. In his despair, he rescues a courtesan who plans to poison the Qing commander with her own body and die alongside him, a vengeful soul even more stubborn and unhinged than Lin Muzhi.
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?”
“I am, but I’m even more afraid of living to see our land shattered.”
Bound together in a time of chaos, the two, each harboring their own resentment and fury, embark on an impossible path.
They seek refuge with the Southern Ming, only to find officials living in drunken indulgence and slaughtering one another. They reach out to rebel forces, only to find them fighting separately and scattered like loose sand. At last, Lin Muzhi understands: on this road of rotten timber and mire, he must first build a bridge with his own hands.
He recruits troops, acquires supplies, reforms military and government affairs, and modernizes firearms. A transmigrated history teacher and a fierce woman bent on revenge rise from the ruins of Yangzhou. They will make this bloodstained land stand again, and ensure that the flame of the civilization called “China” never goes out.
