Li Mo, a special forces champion and master's graduate in materials chemistry, opens his eyes to find himself an orphan herding sheep in the poorest tribe on the grasslands.
He wakes up trampled in the sheepfold, with rheumatic knees and no strength in his legs. All he has are a few dozen sheep and a group of herders waiting to die.
The Beidi raid the flocks and slaughter people. The shamans bind everyone's hands with ancestral traditions. The elders kneel and wait for death, while the young men don't even have the courage to chase after the enemy.
Li Mo stands up and says, “If the wolves bite you, bite them back.”
At Blackstone Ravine, fifty herders ambush fifteen armored horsemen. Victory.
At Blackstone Ravine, a hundred young men take on three hundred cavalrymen. Victory.
But the Beidi are not the only enemy.
A bronze token from the Ghost Shadow organization, striped boot prints from the Hun tribe, secret blue-salt dealings by the shamans, and the hidden hand of the Great Xia border army: the game on the grasslands is far more complicated than he imagined.
No System, no golden finger. He has only the knowledge from his previous life and a reason he cannot afford to fall this time around.
He makes salt, forges iron, bakes bricks, and builds curved-shaft plows. He trains soldiers, builds cities, and creates institutions.
From shepherd to general, from tribal chief to Great Khan, from a sheep bitten by wolves to a wolf that tears out their throats.
