The Shadow Pavilion's two top assassins, Lone Wolf Lu Zheng and Night Owl Li Mo, perish together in a conspiracy orchestrated by the organization's leadership.
When they open their eyes again, it is the bitter winter of 1960, in a village in southern Henan.
Famine has swept the land, and the fields are strewn with the dead. Lu Zheng transmigrates into the body of the Zhao family's most timid third son, while Li Mo transmigrates into the sickly, useless son of the Li family. Each awakens a golden finger: one commands a military-industrial space, the other possesses a spirit spring and fertile fields.
The blood feud from their previous lives remains unsettled, and now they are caught up in a century-old clan war between two families.
The Zhao and Li families have fought over water, battled over land, and struggled for clan authority. Generations of grudges are etched into the threshold of their ancestral hall. Lu Zheng and Li Mo, two elite assassins who clawed their way out of piles of corpses, are destined from their first encounter on the back hill to settle both the score from their previous lives and the conflicts of this one.
One hunts and smelts iron, taking down wild boars, digging for ore, and throwing his weight around on the black market.
The other practices medicine and farms, saving clan members, building connections, and weaving an invisible web in the commune.
Hunger, political campaigns, clan rivalries, and human nature: each is a blade.
And their only enemy is not each other.
From 1960 to 1985, twenty-five years of upheaval and change unfold. Two enemies who once would not rest until the other was dead each build vast family empires spanning politics and business amid the tides of the times. They spend their lives fighting one another, and their lives making one another stronger.
The bullets of their past lives cannot pierce the fate that binds them in this one.
A century of hatred awaits someone to bring it to an end.
