Beyond Sunset Pass, wind and snow swept across the beacon towers on the Gobi frontier.
Seventeen-year-old Qin Lie, the orphaned son of a military family, bore the stigma of his father's supposed treason and was abandoned at the seventh beacon tower, where survival was all but impossible. His father and elder brother had fallen in battle, his family had been falsely accused, and his father's old troops had dwindled. Lu Chengqing, a powerful clan lord of Youzhou, sought to seize the profits of the frontier. He secretly conspired with the Northern Barbarians and planned to use the Hu people's blades to wipe out the Qin family line.
At the brink of death, the ancestral Tiger Tally of the Army Breaker roared to life, awakening the Battle Intent System. Using the baleful energy of the battlefield as fuel and the spirits of countless fallen soldiers as his troops, Qin Lie gained the power to summon elite forces from across the ages: Gansu Militia, Homecoming Cardmen, Qingxu Spearmen, the Qi Family Army's assault squad, the Loyal Spearmen Battalion...
From a lone, crumbling beacon tower, he rose again through blood and fire.
With the baleful aura of the military path, he held the line against cavalry with infantry and defended the isolated beacon tower to the death. He used the flames at Luofeng Slope to disrupt the alliance between the Hu invaders and the powerful clans. With help from Gu Qingchan, a remarkable woman of the Mozi School, he forged weapons, repaired fortresses, rallied scattered frontier troops, and tempered an army's spirit through a hundred battles.
Sunset Pass fell, thirty thousand barbarian horsemen pressed against the border, and the Western Divine Court secretly intervened. Powerful court clans colluded with foreign enemies, and the realm teetered on the brink of collapse.
With an imperial edict appointing him military inspector and clad in bloodied armor, Qin Lie stood atop the ruined pass with his spear in hand. He summoned battle-hardened warriors, forged a true dragon from the army's baleful aura, slew barbarian chieftains, thwarted treacherous plots, protected the displaced people, and cleared the Qin family name.
"The realm lies in dust, its loyal dead buried in the sand.
Even if the whole world stands against me, I'll carve out a bright and open frontier with the spear in my hand."
This is the epic tale of a young orphan who, amid the chaos of a war-torn frontier, summoned warriors of ages past with battle intent and the spirits of the fallen, fought barbarian invaders and corrupt clans, and restored his military family's glory amid the smoke and flames of war.