He opened his eyes amid a heap of corpses.
His left arm was broken, his waterskin was empty, and his mouth was full of his own blood. All around him lay only charred flags and rotting bodies, along with an arrow that had pierced his shoulder, left behind by his own “comrades.”
Three days earlier, the Left Vanguard Battalion of the Mo Family Army had been wiped out.
Three days later, a squad leader named Shen Ze crawled out from the rubble. But he was no longer the Shen Ze he had been. Inside his body lived a soul from the twenty-first century.
There was no System notification, no old man offering a golden finger, and no one to tell him, “Welcome to another world.”
Instead, he faced a siege by three thousand enemy cavalrymen, a shattered remnant of an army, a fortress with only three days’ worth of provisions, and a commander colder than the blizzards sweeping across the Gobi: Mo Zhengyuan.
Mo Zhengyuan said, “Blackwater City is ours, so we defend it. Not because we can hold it, but because we must.”
Shen Ze said, “I just want to live.”
But he soon realized that in this merciless northern desert, staying alive was a war in itself.
From a wounded soldier who went shirtless to signal and was mistaken for a madman, to the youngest captain of the Mo Family Army’s scout battalion; from an “outsider” whom everyone doubted, to a battlefield phantom who struck fear into the enemy. It took him seven months.
The woman he wanted to marry was the fiercest wind on Blackwater City’s trade routes.
Her name was Helan Ci. She said she would never marry a general, only a man who could defeat her.
Shen Ze smiled and drew his blade.
