Ancient firs towered high, their heavy branches and leaves interlacing and stretching outward, a gloomy curtain drawn down from the sky, shrouding the forgotten Land of Return and Sleep. Weathered bones hung from the treetops, rotting ropes linking them to the Solon Tree Pillars, and hollow eyes gazed down from above as they all gave off the rustling, whimpering murmur of the dead.
Among the bones of so many Jurchen tribesmen, the only corpse dressed in dark-red Han clothing, after hanging from the tree for two generations, finally fell into the dust. At this moment, he lay on the damp mossy earth, both hands still held in an embracing posture, his eye sockets empty, staring deeply at the people who had come to collect his body. Unfortunately, on this forgotten land, those who came were not the Great Ming government troops he had yearned for day and night, but his own clansmen and descendants in this vast sea of forest, already turned into barbarians!
In this boundlessly vast and deep northeastern forest, the light of civilization had always been like an epiphyllum blooming for one brief instant, long since vanishing into the distance with the snowflakes. Cold darkness covered ten thousand li, following the trail where the light had faded, step by step toward an even harsher, icier future.
For thousands of years, the boundary between hunting and farming, the divide between savagery and civilization, seemed never to have changed. It merely rose and fell now and then, like a tide swelling and ebbing over centuries, warming the Bohai Kingdom until it produced rice, then making snow drift for a thousand li across Hainan Island. And in that rise and fall, the fate of all living things across the ten thousand li between was like billions of grains of dust