A Career Path Like Smoke

In the 1980s, the wheat on the plains of northern Anhui turned yellow and green again and again. In the mud-brick house of Li Family Village in Wangba Town, a rural youth flips through Romance of the Three Kingdoms by the light of an oil lamp, bought from an old bookstall in town. Outside, the Beifei River flows quietly in the night. He does not know that two years later this river will become a furious dragon, swallow his father, and completely change the course of his life.

This youth is named Li Lin. From childhood, he studied under an unnamed bodyguard who had drifted into the countryside during the Republic of China era. He trained fists on the threshing ground and practiced horse stance beneath jujube trees; every move came from genuine old-school skill brought out of a bygone age by his master. In high school, he excelled in both academics and martial arts, and was well known at the county No. 1 High School as someone with both civil and martial talent. If not for that flood, he might have been admitted to a local university and perhaps returned to a northern Anhui county town as a teacher or civil servant, living an ordinary, steady life.

But the massive flood in 1998 changed everything. His father's sacrifice, Zhang Wutong's promise, Old Man Zhang's dying instruction—these events were like gates, steering him toward another completely different river. He put on a military uniform and entered military academy, from the northern Anhui plains to the northern China barracks, from the Tibetan plateau to the hills of western Henan, struggling, striving, and reflecting in the surging tide of the world, and beginning an ordinary yet full of twists and turns life.