The general let a child escape. The price was exile to a barren mountain. Beneath it lay a dragon, blinded and pinned down six hundred years earlier by Liu Bowen. Eighty-one days later, on the night the dragon took flight, its tail swept across the land and left behind fertile fields. The place came to be called Old Dragon’s Lair.
Six hundred years later, a descendant of the general returned to Old Dragon’s Lair. Standing on the field ridge, she finally understood one thing: the dragon’s blessings were not in the heavens. They were in every blade of grass and every tree.
