This was an age when rites and music had fallen into ruin. Li Cunxu, Liu Shouguang, Wang Rong, Zhang Wenli... Warlords sharpened their blades, while bones carpeted both banks of the great river.
It was also an age when the sword determined a person's worth. The great clans of old could be reduced to dust in a single upheaval.
A soul from a later age descended into the last surviving orphan of the Lu family, a local gentry clan in Hebei that had already been wiped out. The clan had been framed by a military governor and slaughtered to the last. Only the young Lu Yan remained, with nothing but an old marriage contract in his arms.
Everyone said a fallen orphan had to cling to a powerful family to survive. But Lu Yan did the opposite. He went to the woman's door and called off the engagement, then used the favor of releasing her from the marriage to bargain for a military post from her family's military governor's headquarters.
His blade left its sheath, his spear swept across the wilderness. Amid the arrogant, fierce elite troops, he tempered himself in mountains of corpses and seas of blood. He would avenge his clan's blood feud at home, maneuver among the rival warlords of Liang and Jin abroad, and carve out a path to supremacy in an age of chaos.
