At twenty-four, he was a national martial arts champion who died suddenly on a film set.
At sixteen, Champion Marquis Huo Qubing woke up as someone else.
He is Lin Xiao, and he is Huo Qubing.
When modern combat theory on momentum transfer meets the battlefield of cold steel, and the rhythm of mixed martial arts reshapes cavalry combat, the empire's youngest general in history uses eyes that don't belong to this era to measure the land beneath his feet anew.
But there is no sealing Mount Langjuxu, no watering horses in the vast northern sea.
He lies in a cramped side room at Princess Pingyang's residence, so shabby even the rats would turn up their noses. He's been burning with fever for two days and nights, and his mother has to count out copper coins just to save enough for a dose of medicine.
His uncle Wei Qing has just returned from a great victory at Shuofang, appointed Grand General and raised above the Three Excellencies.
And he has only one year.
A year from now, the Battle of the Southern Desert: eight hundred light cavalry will ride deep into the wilderness. It will be the first opportunity history gives him, and the last.
But he won't fight alone.
Zhao Ponu, Gao Buzhi, Zhang Qian, Li Guang, Wei Qing, Emperor Wu of Han... The empire's rising stars will appear one by one.
King Hunxie, King Xiutu, Chanyu Yizhixie: every antagonist is vivid and human, someone readers will love and hate in equal measure.
Dark currents swirl at court, while blades flash across the depths of the grasslands.
This is not the tale of one man's rise to greatness.
It is a portrait of the heroes of an era, and a life-or-death wager on the fate of an empire.
When the seventeen-year-old general builds an altar atop Mount Langjuxu to offer sacrifices to Heaven, no one knows that a warrior from two thousand years in the future lives within his soul.
And hidden in that warrior's gloves is the fate of all the lands beyond the northern frontier.
