Late Tang Dynasty. Caizhou.
Qin Zongquan lets his troops eat people and sets up a human flesh market. Women are priced at fifty coins, able-bodied men at a hundred, and the old and weak at thirty.
Shen Qiao, the sixteen-year-old son of a hunter, has his mother abducted to the western camp. With a hunting knife, half a cloth shoe embroidered with flowers, and fifty copper coins, he enters a city where human bones are firewood and human flesh is food.
He fails to buy his mother's freedom. She dies.
From then on, a boy with no golden finger, no modern knowledge, and no literacy crawls through a cannibalistic age, fighting to survive. From Caizhou's Bone Market to the siege of Chenzhou, from labor camps to a bear's den deep in the mountains, he stays alive with a chipped hunting knife, a hunter's bow and arrows, and half a scrap of scorched, stiff cloth. He stays alive, and nothing more.
Qin Zongquan declares himself emperor. Zhu Quanzhong sharpens his blades. The world is a cauldron, and its people are gruel. The boy has only one thought: If I don't die today, I'll live one more day.
