Lighting Mountain: White Bones Under the Long Smoking Pole

Dian Deng Mountain is never just an ordinary mountain, but a shackle firmly locked in the deep mountains of northern Guizhou. This place is filled with thick white fog all year round, and the winding bluestone roads and moss have absorbed the rainwater from the mountains and are also soaked with the blood of the human world. Li Yuanbai, the owner of Deng Deng Mountain, was destined to fall into this quagmire and spend his whole life struggling from the moment he took over his father's long ebony tobacco stick in the mourning hall at the age of seventeen. Internally, he had to face the gentle and compassionate but unfathomable face of his mistress Zhou. She weaves a web with silk threads of warmth, bowls of nourishing decoctions, and seemingly well-intentioned prescriptions, and has all the concubines and heirs in the inner house at her fingertips. Her second biological son, Changhe, and her third son, Changshan, were used as bargaining chips in the game; while the eldest son, Changqing, left behind by her original wife, could only develop a forbearance among the sawdust and piled up account books in the old farmhouse. Externally, the blades of the bandits, the guns of the Guizhou army, and the surging voices of the peasant associations are like wildfires burning in the mountains, which will one day burn through the fog that lingers all year round. Li Yuanbai once thought that he could safeguard the Li family's foundation. He thought that the long cigarette pole in his hand could suppress all undercurrents and rebellions. Until his deathbed, with desolation in his eyes, he held his son Changqing's hand and left his last words: "The road was built by the Zhou family, and the mountain belongs to the Li family." Many years later, Li Changhe returned to his hometown on a mule, covered in the dust of the mountains. Looking at the smoke rising from the village and the contract between the brothers, he truly understood the helplessness hidden in his father's final words.