Under the iron hooves of the Canglang Empire, grief fills the border town of the Qin Kingdom. Painter Qin Mo has hit rock bottom: he has lost his love and all his dignity. Just when he is at his most desperate, an ancient divine brush falls into his hands. It can turn the imaginary into reality, giving life to the faintest strokes of ink. At first, he uses it only to help the poor and destitute, conjuring grain and medicinal herbs with his brush and becoming a faint glimmer in the darkness. But when war breaks out again and the army of his dear friend Li Qing is trapped in a desperate situation, Qin Mo finally takes up his brush against the flames of war. First he creates arrows to relieve the immediate crisis, then recreates a lost siege crossbow, and even paints a divine steed for a comrade on the brink of death. When the city falls, he uses his divine brush to forge a path to survival. From then on, the scope of his brushstrokes is no longer confined to a sheet of paper. He gathers refugees and builds a new city, using his brush as its backbone to hold up a world on the verge of collapse. With ink and color, his paintings do more than bring things into being: they quietly influence the flow of fortune in the mortal world. And so, from the brush of a man once mocked as a “useless scholar,” a grand path to salvation unfolds, until the fate of the land itself is rewritten.
