The Yanxia dynasty has stood for fifteen hundred years. The Shenlong people have received the favor of Heaven and Earth, accumulating merit among mortals.
Foreign peoples covet this sacred land, lying in wait for a thousand years and gnawing away at it for a century.
Civil officials at court collude with the enemy, military officers accept bribes and sell out the defenses, and the emperor stands alone, unable to hold the line.
When Wen Xiaoman is born, the land is still prosperous.
The only daughter in sixteen generations of her family, she is doted on by her entire clan and believes peace will last forever.
Then disaster strikes, and heaven and earth are overturned.
After signing the Surrender for the Protection of the People, the emperor hangs himself for his country, and his body is desecrated by the foreign peoples.
The Ten-Colored Banners tear up their treaty. The thirteen prefectures of the Nine Provinces become a living hell, and humanity is reduced to two-legged rations for the foreign peoples.
Xiaoman flees south with her clan. Through seven years of bloodshed, she witnesses the horrors of the world:
Plagues run rampant, and corpses litter the land;
famine erupts, and people trade their children for food;
her own people are sold into slavery, and bones pile up like mountains;
women are imprisoned and forced to work, children become food, and living people are injected with beast blood for experiments.
The once-delicate young lady becomes a survivor, never without a blade and all too familiar with bloodshed.
Her clan scatters, and she loses her memory while cultivating immortality. By the time her memories return, her homeland has long since become scorched earth.
A century later, Nanzhan has been divided by the foreign peoples into eleven kingdoms. The history books have been rewritten, and the past of the Shenlong people has nearly vanished.
She becomes a writer, taking up her brush to record the lives of countless departed souls on their native soil:
They lived. They came. They were once the masters of this land.
Though all things are forgotten, I alone remember. Though all ages renew themselves, I alone preserve the past.
[Content warning] The overall tone is bleak and tragic. This is not a power fantasy, and there will be no defying fate to change the world. It contains extensive depictions of war, death, and the darkest parts of human nature. A slow-paced serious drama, not a fast-paced, feel-good story. The female lead is no savior. She is simply the one who survives to the end.
Theme: Prosperous times always come to an end, and the rise and fall of nations are left to the Heavenly Way. When a dynasty falls and a civilization withers, there is no miracle to save the day. Survivors bear the painful memories of their age alone, recording the choices people make in times of chaos and exploring the joys and sorrows of humanity amid memory, inheritance, and cycles of rebirth.
