The villagers call him a demon child. They bind him to a pyre and burn him alive.
As he dies, he points to the sky and says, "At midnight, rain will come from the southeast."
A torrential downpour answers his words. As the terrified villagers kneel and worship him, he sees something deep in the curtain of rain: a pitch-black star falling toward Jiuli. For sixteen years, no one has believed that he can see the "paths": roads between the stars, patterns between heaven and earth, and the eight gates of life and death in the four directions, all clear as day to him.
After he is driven from his village, he meets the Yellow Emperor, ruler of all under heaven. Someone asks what makes him think they can win. He answers, "Heaven and earth are the board, and all things are the pieces." In a single night, he goes from prisoner to a man of state, using the arts of Qimen Dunjia to set formations, defeat enemies, and calculate the fate of the world. Chiyou personally leads eighty-one armies of murderous soldiers to the border, while the great shamans of Jiuli offer ten thousand beasts in sacrifice to heaven. And he will stake his life on a thousand years of peace.
What he must win is more than a single Battle of Zhuolu.
What he must win is a world, four thousand years from now, where no one ever needs the words "demon child" again.
A boy who defies fate. A game of strategy spanning four thousand years. Turn the page, and you won't be able to put it down.
