In the final years of the Great Xuan Dynasty, natural disasters and man-made calamities ravaged the land, powerful clans schemed against one another, and foreign enemies stood at the borders.
The most notorious wastrel in Lingzhou City was Xu Wujiu, young master of the Yunmeng Trading Company. He loved two things above all: tofu pudding and watching the commotion.
One day, while watching a clash between salt smugglers in the street, he had his candied figurine knocked over by Shi Xiaole, a refugee boy fleeing for his life.
“Pay up!” Xu Wujiu grabbed the boy by his ragged collar.
Shi Xiaole shoved half a coarse, rock-hard steamed bun into his hand. “I’m broke. This is all I have.”
That night, tiles shattered on the roof of a side residence at the marquis’s estate. Shi Xiaole had tried to steal half a sack of rice and fallen through the roof of Xu Wujiu’s warm jade bath.
The young master, his wet hair dripping, looked at the dazed boy. “Not bad. Want to join me in a big job? We’ll steal the grain my father’s caravan has stored away and use it to help the disaster victims.”
Shi Xiaole wiped his face. “Do you provide meals? As long as they’re filling.”
Thus began history’s most hopeless partnership of robbing the rich to help the poor: a wastrel young master and a starving former mine slave.
Until one day, Xu Wujiu ladled up a bowl at a disaster-relief porridge tent and discovered grains of star-patterned steel, a specialty of the Yunmeng Trading Company, mixed into the rice...
Meanwhile, at Shi Xiaole’s waist, a dust-covered Azure Dragon Jade began to grow faintly warm.
