The least valuable place in Great Jing is called the Death Camp.
It holds prisoners, deserters, and refugees, who are sent to the front each season according to the "expendable quota." Once you pass through its gates, your name no longer matters.
The name on the register was supposed to be Lu Huaishuo.
But the one who arrived was his younger sister, Lu Huaige.
Her father was a minister accused of "collaborating with the enemy," and the whole family had been exiled. Halfway along the road, her brother fell from the pack frame and broke a leg. He couldn't even stand. The guards said anyone who couldn't keep walking should simply be thrown away along the road.
She didn't throw him away. She dragged him into a half-collapsed hut in a mountain hollow, left him a small bag of roasted rice, and heard him say two words: "Wait for me."
The register demanded someone who could walk. Her brother couldn't. So she learned to answer to his name. She practiced for two months, until when someone called "Lu Huaige" behind her, she didn't even turn around.
Everyone in the Death Camp laughed at how thin she was, how she couldn't write, how she could barely hold a blade.
Three months later, the people who had laughed at her were still crouched in camp, chewing spoiled rations. She had already led three hundred soldiers to trap two thousand Wolf Fang Cavalry in a narrow pass in the Snow Ridge.
All she wanted was to survive and find out whether her father had really collaborated with the enemy.
But the half-page she uncovered didn't say "collaborated with the enemy."
It said "ordered to abandon the post."
The order that had cost her father his life hadn't come from the enemy. It had come from above.
And the down-and-out soldier who had once fought her for a mouthful of water in the Death Camp was missing half the little finger on his left hand. Later, he sat upon the imperial throne.
Some injustices must be redressed face-to-face.
Later, he became emperor and offered her the most honored position in the realm.
That wasn't what she wanted.
She wanted the border line: from now on, no one would ever cross it again.
