Thorny Bronze Camel

In the first year of the Taikang era, Jin conquered Wu, and a realm divided for nearly a century was reunited under one house. In Yanmen, Bingzhou, eight-year-old Geng Ge, the son of a military household, crouched by the thawing river and listened as the adults said there would be no more wars. He believed them. At seventeen, he donned the armor of the imperial guards and entered Luoyang, a city of ten thousand lights, hoping to serve it well. He did not know that those lights would not burn for long. A short, dark, scheming empress; a fierce but short-lived young prince; a mediocre, greedy great-uncle; an extravagant meritorious official; the loyal and valiant Prince of Changsha, burned to death… In sixteen years, eight princes of the Sima clan devoured one another over a single imperial palace. They swore blood brotherhood one day and cut each other down the next; they raised someone to the throne today and executed him tomorrow. Geng Ge, once a boy who believed in "loyalty and righteousness," was left behind, conscripted, and swept along by one ruler after another. He could only watch as those words lost their value in pools of blood, until no one believed in them anymore. A Jie, his Jie friend who had torn a fox pelt alongside him in childhood, was sold into slavery amid the chaos, fought his way through bloodshed, and ultimately ended up facing him on the battlefield. While the princes hacked at each other in the Central Plains, true beasts had already grown strong beyond the frontier. By the time the Eight Princes had settled who would prevail, the Luoyang they had fought over for sixteen years was already hearing the neighing of barbarian horses beyond its gates.