Song Xiao

Chu Tianya, a modern criminal police officer, wakes up to find himself in the Taiyuan area in the late Northern Song dynasty, surviving in troubled times under an unfamiliar identity. At this time, the Song dynasty has enjoyed peace for a long time and its military preparedness has decayed; powerful eunuchs dominate the court, the Jin people in the north are eyeing the territory covetously, and the shadow of the Jingkang Incident is approaching day by day. With the meticulous thinking and investigative methods of a criminal police officer, Chu Tianya maneuvers among officialdom, the prison city, and the border army: he uses his position to set up a deception and rescues the imprisoned Taihang Mountain loyalist Xue Yu from the Taiyuan prison; he also uses strategies such as reducing cooking fires to feign weakness and the attack and defense of Yingzhou to confront powerful enemies, gradually integrating old units such as the Yang family generals and the Zhe family army with newly recruited soldiers into a fighting force. The novel's plot advances along two interwoven lines: battlefield warfare and court intrigue. It includes both iron-horse and icy-river military formations and emotional entanglements such as imperially mandated marriages, portraying the protagonist's growth from confusion to a figure with both the boldness of a warlord and concern for the nation. The book is divided into three volumes and 246 sections, with the thread of "endless enemy heads to cut, endless heroic blood to shed" and the theme of "my fate is determined by me, not by heaven," presenting the collision between individual destiny and the tide of history at the turn of the two Song dynasties.