Hunters of the Land in the Flames of the War Against Japan

Shen Lie, the son of a hunter from the Greater Khingan Mountains, carries his grandfather’s hunting knife, Zhou Zhenshan’s Eight Windbreaking Cuts, and Lin Huairen’s dying request. From the snowy plains of the Northeast, he fights his way all the way to the rainforests of Burma. He may not be the strongest soldier, but he has the least regard for the rules. The Japanese advance by military doctrine; he plays by a hunter’s instincts: wait, calculate, kill. Three silent sentries in three seconds. A chain of tripwire grenades strung through the bamboo forest. Seven men cut down in the cramped space of a train car with the Eight Windbreaking Cuts. When forty Japanese soldiers surround a mountain, he draws them away alone, carrying a sixteen-year-old wounded soldier seven li over mountain trails. He isn’t fighting a war. He’s hunting. At the Yeren Mountain aid station, Lin Wan finds a list of seven names hidden in a medical file. Among the two names circled in red is a Japanese spy embedded among the Nationalist Army’s upper ranks. Three days later, a medicine convoy is ambushed. The ambush plan bears the signature “White Crane,” and two people at the aid station share a key to the station’s tent. Twelve chests of gold bricks, forty in each. The Japanese army’s “Special Supplies Squad” has only just begun to reveal its looting network, and the engines of a new convoy are already roaring deep in the jungle. The hunter has nowhere to retreat. Not one can be lost.