In the autumn of the seventeenth year of the Tianshun reign, Qingshui County had suffered years of drought. The court was as good as dead, its officials negligent, while the emperor was foolish and debauched. Seventeen-year-old Lin Ponu had lost his family and everything he owned. Faced with piles of bones beneath the landlord's whip and the endless “protection levies” demanded at the county office, one autumn night he finally spoke those words to his brothers, Xie Liangxiong and Zhu Jiamin: “Let's rebel.”
The three raised their banner as dirt-poor peasants: three hundred starving refugees and thirty rusty blades. Starting with the first strike that buried the tyrant Cao Bao alive, in just one year they killed Zhou Baoren and Sun Meng, defeated Cao Wenrui, and took both Qingshui and Hanlin Counties. Lin Dongzhi, an old instructor of the imperial guards, taught them his skills and passed on his blade. Shen Yanzhang, a wealthy merchant from Qingzhou, sacrificed his fortune to help them through hard times. The scholar Gao Yulong charged alone into a vast army, while the woman soldier Wu Xinlan wielded twin spears to take on enemy generals. The Iron Blossom Battalion grew from a lone stronghold into a blade driven into the heart of the old dynasty.
From Qingshui County to Qingzhou City, from three hundred starving refugees to four thousand battle-hardened soldiers, from a peasant who could barely write his own name to a young general commanding armies: this is a story of outlaws taking root in a chaotic age, and iron blossoms beginning to bloom. Zhang Yiling, a talented young woman from Jiangnan, recorded with her brush the entire journey of this city and its people, from obscurity to radiance. Can the old dynasty, rotten to the core, be torn out by the roots? Can flesh and blood turn back the black tide surging down from the north? The flowers of the Iron Blossom Battalion have only just broken through the soil.
