Ma Botao gets a second chance at life. When he opens his eyes, it is 1925, and he is the only son of Ma Shixiong, warlord commander of the Northwestern Dingwu Army: the young marshal.
He is nineteen, a wastrel. He buys the title of the provincial capital’s biggest playboy at auction, turns the marshal’s mansion’s grand hall into a nightclub, and pawns the guards’ guns to fund a barbecue stall. He does all of it. But at midnight, he climbs over the wall to study military texts and draw blueprints in a hidden room behind a mutton shop. By day, the money he scatters throughout the city goes to beggars. Six huge characters painted on the city wall look like sheer mischief on the surface, but secretly, he is waiting for the people he must meet.
His father is an old-school warlord, and on the battlefield, bullets make no distinction. Ma Botao knows what he can do. He knows which spring in a gun barrel needs an extra half-turn, how to calculate rents so the poor can still make a living, and remembers the signal flare that failed to go off on the cliff. The times will spare no one, and he has no intention of letting them carry him along. The more outrageous things look on the surface, the more meticulous his plans are underneath.
