How far can you get out of the dust on the river beach?
The story begins with a rural youth named "Er Mao" who is familiar with every crack in the system and longs to get rid of his muddy background and become a real "official". To this end, he forged himself into a precise chess piece, treating people's hearts and rules as ladders to climb upward. From an unknown person in the village committee to a capital trader in the county town, he changed his nickname and became the powerful "Zhang Zeduan", moving and flickering in the tide of the times, step by step.
However, when power becomes the only belief, every seemingly successful leap is accompanied by the ruthless exile of conscience. He made good use of the rules, but was eventually backlashed by them; he regarded others as stepping stones, and he was ultimately unable to escape the fate of gravity. The novel uses the life trajectory of a power chaser from prosperity to overthrow, calmly examining how desire alienates people, and how those seemingly solid alliances and sophisticated calculations are as light as dust in the torrent of reality.
