North Wind Ember

Pei Zhaowei has been a small official for half his life, and his greatest skill is settling accounts. He never thought that one day he would use this account to remember dead people. Six towns were in chaos. The court paid no attention to them. He took more than 200 old, weak, women and children from the northernmost town of Huaishuo, crossed the Gobi, crossed the Yellow River, and walked south step by step. There is no golden finger, no system, no time travel - he only has a pen, a bag of counters, and a roster that he reads over and over again at night. In the team there are needlework widows who can sing Chilean songs, old scholars who have been writing letters for half their lives, Xianbei soldiers who were bitten by snakes but can fight one against ten, and old people who have been sitting on rocks for three years waiting for their children to cross the river. They are not heroes, they just want to survive in troubled times. But being alive itself is a feat. Nine years, three thousand miles, two hundred people. An epic about "walking" - not conquest, but migration. Not victory, but arrival.