Homeland of Mountains and Rivers

The fourteenth year of Orthodoxy, the eve of the Tumubao Incident. Shen Huaiyuan, a garrison soldier at Juyong Pass, guarded the pass for forty-two years and died on the wall. Before his death, he put a hand-drawn border defense map that had been hidden for twenty years into the hands of his grandson Shen Nanshan. Seventeen-year-old Shen Nanshan didn't know that the cinnabar marks on that map hid the entire geography of the northern Beijing defense line that one person had spent half a lifetime surveying and mapping—including every infiltration route of the Ora cavalry. He didn't even know that after the city brick was smashed on his forehead, an extra pair of "eyes" would appear in his mind: all the land he walked through was engraved into his memory in a three-dimensional form, clearly and accurately. From the ruins of Juyongguan to the examination room of Jinling, from the oil lamp of the Hanlin Academy to the flag of Governor Xuanda, from the muddy mountain road in Guizhou Miaojiang to the smoke of gunpowder at the foot of Yinshan Mountain - he changed his fate against the odds with his knowledge of geography, from an orphan with a humble military family to the position of chief minister of the Ming Dynasty cabinet. But along the way, he personally sent away his mentor, watched his loyal minister die unjustly, chose silence in the middle of the night when he was seizing the door, and learned to hand over power amidst the suspicion of his superiors. He spent his whole life doing two things: so that there would no longer be "no man's land" on the map of mountains and rivers, and that the people at the border would no longer be afraid of hearing the enemy's hoofbeats at dawn. He did both of these things. ——"Guanshan remains the same, but the boy is no longer there. But Shanhe knows that someone has fought for it."