[Alternate History] [Political Intrigue] [Ensemble Cast] [Rousing Military Action] [Underdog Comeback]
Gu Ye has served in the army for ten years, fighting his way from the Northern Frontier to the Western Frontier and rising from a hundred-man commander to a colonel.
He thought his skills would earn him fame and glory, but discovered he was nothing more than a discarded pawn on the powerful elite's chessboard.
Nine-tenths of the army's provisions and pay were withheld, leaving the soldiers to chew dry biscuits and drink muddy water;
His superior lounged in his tent, drinking and carousing with his concubine, while sending five hundred hungry men to risk their lives against the sand bandits;
At court, those nobles sent officers who refused to grovel before them to their deaths, calling it a "reassignment" when it was really a death sentence.
But Gu Ye refused to believe fate was set in stone.
When fifteen hundred sand bandit cavalry surrounded a valley, he took just twenty men and slipped through the darkness, killing the bandit chief with a single shot and rescuing a disgraced prince exiled to the Western Frontier to die;
With hidden arrows impossible to guard against, he was determined to carve a path through even the deadliest trap.
From a frontier soldier in the Western lands to the heart of the imperial court, from cannon fodder trampled underfoot to commander of the mighty Northern Pacification Army:
In this world, the capable rule. The struggle for supremacy begins now.
If you leave me no way to live, I'll carve one out myself.
The plot is captivating.