Defending Xiguan: The Great Qian Dynasty’s Fiercest Soldier

In the fourteenth year of the Zhenping era, envoys from every nation came to pay tribute to the Great Qian Empire. Emperor Taizong Pei Chengqian seized the throne by murdering his brother in the Xuanjia Gate Incident, forging an unprecedented golden age through blood and political intrigue. Yet beneath the splendor lay a massacre from fifteen years ago: the entire family of Pei Yuan Zheng, founding Marshal of the Armies, was executed, and only a baby in swaddling clothes was unaccounted for. Along the Anxi Corridor, beyond Dingxi Pass, yellow sand filled the sky. A cook named Pei Ji was crouched behind the stove, sneaking a chicken leg. Greedy, slick, and always grinning, he was the most useless cook in the army. Every month, he spent all the copper coins he had saved on rouge, which he sent to a woman who never wrote back. A greasy apron was always tied around his waist, and his wide grin flashed teeth so white they could blind you. No one knew that he had lost half of his left index finger to a pack of wolves when he was a child. No one knew that what he had hidden behind the kitchen's rear wall was not a firewood stick, but a battered Mo Dao blade. And no one knew that his real name was Pei Yansu, the only legitimate grandson of the marshal whose family had been wiped out, and a man of the same clan and bloodline as the current emperor. When three thousand Turkic cavalry ambushed the imperial envoy and only he and a band of wounded soldiers remained in the garrison, Pei Ji smashed the iron pot, drew his Mo Dao, and grinned. “Who’s coming with me to kill them?” Behind him, a scholar at death's door unfurled a map and said coldly, “Thirty li west. Set an ambush in the valley, and we can survive.” The scholar was Xu Fufeng, the abandoned illegitimate son of the dynasty's powerful chancellor. From then on, there was a blade and a fan. One killed the body; the other destroyed the heart. From army cook to Marquis of Dingxi, he carved a bloody path forward, stepping over the faces of the powerful.