Twelve years after the nuclear blast, the sky is gray.
Lin Wanqing was once a biological researcher in a shelter. Now she's the mother of a five-year-old boy. Her son, Xiao Yuan, has stage three ashification disease, a bizarre illness awakened by radiation that turns a person's skin inch by inch into a gray, hard shell, until they become a living statue. The illness runs its course in three to four months. All she has is half a bottle of water-purification tablets, a rusty scalpel, and a metal tag her husband pressed into her hand on the day of the nuclear blast.
On the back of the metal tag are the words: White Crow 17.3k.
To save her son, she leaves the shelter and sets out across the surface. The wasteland is home to mutated dogs, bears, and insects, thinking primates, markets where people trade water-purification tablets and bullets, an armed settlement calling itself the Iron Throne, and a legend: to the south lies an oasis untouched by radiation.
She meets Chen, a one-armed old man. He trades food for mechanical parts, watches over an abandoned gas station, and keeps a dog named Huihui. His daughter died in the year of the nuclear blast, and he has never managed to do a single great thing in his life.
She meets the taciturn White Crow. She once studied ashification disease, but now practices medicine in the wasteland, carrying a metal case on her back that must never be opened. Her daughter's name was Niannian, and in life she loved sunflowers most of all.
She meets Zhao Tiezhu. He rules the Iron Throne and believes in one saying: "Hope is the greatest lie." He once heard the word "oasis" over a shelter's radio. Then everyone in that shelter died.
Everyone has their own ruins. Everyone is looking for someone they can never get back.
