Dirty Fire: the Orphan of the God-Stealing Picture and the World-Burning Fire

The snow in Tosa Domain is gray. While burying the last bit of tenderness, a seven-year-old child dug out something else from the depths of the frozen soil—not food, but a roll of drawings wrapped tightly in oilcloth that smelled of rust and ink. He couldn't read, but he recognized the word "fire" in the small note beside the picture. Fire. In this land where even despair has been frozen, that is a delusion more luxurious than the remaining warmth. Carrying this unsatisfactory secret, he walked towards the deeper shadows in the lower reaches of Jing River - where a one-eyed man who had been half eaten by the war curled up, guarding the room full of "inedible" waste paper and old wounds. So, the two hungers met in the dilapidated longhouse. A bite to the stomach. The other kind, eats the soul. The man taught him how to read. Don't teach romance, don't teach loyalty and filial piety. It only teaches the bones of iron, the blood of fire, and those winding and exotic symbols that are said to be able to "make dead things walk and iron bullets fly." He said, this is not knowledge, it is a sword. If you hold it, you may get cut, or you may cut something off. This is a story about "another kind of hunger". In a world where everything can be converted into "stone height" and "number of warriors", how two people who have been excluded from the measurement system can forge a roll of nameless drawings and a pile of scrap metal-like knowledge into a silent burning fire that belongs only to them.