In the late Eastern Han, the Yellow Turban Rebellion sets the realm ablaze.
When Chen Chong wakes up, he’s wearing stinking hemp clothes, holding a chipped spear, and staring at a bowl of thin gruel with so few grains he can count them. He’s gone from a graduate student in paleontology to a conscripted refugee among the Yellow Turbans, and it takes him three whole days to accept that he isn’t dreaming.
There’s no romantic age of heroes here, only the brutal sight of bones exposed in the fields and not a single cockcrow for a thousand miles. Beneath the blades of so-called legendary generals lie mostly silent, withered bones. Righteousness and virtue won’t get you so much as half a moldy wheat cake.
Chen Chong just wants to stay alive and get enough to eat.
But the first time he stops a comrade from striking a woman or child, the first time he gives his saved rations to a starving child, and the first time someone kneels before him and calls him a savior, he realizes that in this dog-eat-dog world, simply trying to be a “human being” is the hardest thing of all.
It begins with a single bowl, then grows to a city, a province, and at last the whole realm.
He has no ambition to crown himself king, but whenever he looks back, he finds the eyes of countless followers upon him.
I only wanted to keep to myself and live in peace. But this world won’t let me be a speck of dust.”
This is the story of how one man uses a single spear to lay down new rules for a crumbling age.
