In the twenty-first year of the Jingzhen era under the Great Liang dynasty, the Later Jin Jurchens, entrenched in Liaodong, mass troops outside Shanhai Pass. They declare that unless they receive the tribute payments Great Liang owes them, they will storm the pass with their iron hooves. At the same time, the Mongols north of the frontier gather and march south to harass the border garrisons at Datong and Xuanfu, seizing grain and plundering the countryside. To Great Liang’s northwest, the Wusai people, who have taken the Western Regions’ place as the dominant power after the Kara-Khanid Khanate, watch Yumen Pass like a predator stalking its prey.
Forty years have passed since Emperor Xiwu of Great Liang first sent troops north beyond the frontier and slaughtered their way through the Mongol royal court. Thirty-four years have passed since Great Liang’s glorious western expedition. And twenty years have passed since Emperor Xiwu’s death, when the civil officials seized power in a coup and forced a child emperor to move the court south. Great Liang has remained divided between north and south for twenty years.
In the summer of the twenty-first year of the Jingzhen era, Li Hu arrives in the northern frontier during the final, turbulent years of this Han dynasty. His soul inhabits the body of a foolish young boy called Hu’er. Faced with his father’s death, his fellow clansmen bullying his brothers, and his widowed mother and young sister desperately needing someone to rely on, he grips the great spear in his hands and sets out to carve out a place to survive on the northern frontier.
