Banners and Flags Sweep Through the Dust of a Troubled Age

He was born into an official’s family, yet was merely a son of a concubine, bullied and schemed against at every turn. He had once been full of ambition, but for one reason or another, he became known as a good-for-nothing. He was literate and well-read, yet somehow ended up a merchant and a man of arms. Follow a bachelor of thirty, still unmarried, as he makes his way to the peak of life amid the upheavals of the late Sui and early Tang dynasties, earning a noble title and rising to high office. See how a low-ranking clerk of thirty, still without a wife, finds a place of his own amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood, where one man’s success is built on the bones of countless others. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps it was fate.