After her wedding, Dai Fenglian returns to her parents’ home for three days and refuses to eat. Great-Granddad, fixated on the black mule promised to him by Shan Tingxiu, slaps her and orders her to accept the marriage. She finally eats in a fury, hurling bowls across the room, then experiences a mental health crisis. Her mind replays the sedan-chair journey, the highwayman at Toad Hollow, and the moment Yu Zhan’ao kissed her. She is tormented by alternating memories of Yu’s passionate face and her husband’s grotesque one, and recalls Yu’s command to return in three days.

Resolving that life is too short for timidity, she prepares herself carefully, mounts the donkey astride rather than sidesaddle, and sets off. Along the road she passes lightning-scorched sorghum and thinks of her friend, Beauty, reportedly struck dead as divine punishment for abandoning a foundling. At Toad Hollow, the donkey balks at the highwayman’s decomposing corpse. Dai Fenglian coaxes it past. As she nears the Shan village, a man hidden in the sorghum sings a bold, flirtatious song to her.

The narrative jumps to 1939, the evening after the Black Water River ambush. Fifteen-year-old Douguan eats a fistcake and drinks the brackish, blood-tinged river water to ease his thirst. He finds Commander Yu on the dike, visibly aged, weeping and despairing. Douguan rallies him with a fierce promise to perfect his shooting and settle accounts with Detachment Leader Leng. Yu eats, drinks from the river, and submerges his head for a long time before resurfacing.

They search the fields for survivors. All their comrades are dead, including Bugler Liu, who has been frozen kneeling with his bugle; Fang Seven, who has had his intestines stuffed back into his belly and covered with sorghum leaves; and Consumptive Four, who has fallen unconscious from blood loss. Fang Seven, knowing he cannot be saved, begs Commander Yu to shoot him and look after his wife and infant son. Yu mercifully kills him, then shoots Consumptive Four. The pistol drops from his hand. Douguan picks it up and leads his dazed father toward home under the cold half-moon.

The timeline shifts back roughly 16 years. Yu Zhan’ao, 24, has already slept with Dai Fenglian in the sorghum field, though she is still legally married to Shan Bianlang.

Yu walks to a tavern run by “Gook,” a Korean dog-butcher, where he encounters the bandit chief Spotted Neck, a tall man with a white spot on his neck. Spotted Neck dismisses him contemptuously. That night, Yu hides in the sorghum, watches Spotted Neck leave the tavern, grips his sword, and considers killing him, but decides against it, reasoning the bandit is an enemy of Magistrate Nine Dreams Cao, who once had Yu beaten. Still, Yu is pleased to know he could have killed him.

Yu infiltrates the Shan compound, sets fire to sorghum leaves as a diversion. While the household fights the blaze, Yu stabs Shan Bianlang in his bed. He then ambushes Shan Tingxiu in his doorway. After tying the corpses together, he dumps them in the western inlet.

A long flashback recounts Yu’s earlier life: At 13, Yu watched his widowed mother begin an affair with a monk. At 16, he killed the monk with a short sword beside Pear Blossom Creek. He fled, gambled, was caught by Magistrate Cao, punished with 200 lashes and public humiliation, and hired on as a sedan bearer, after which his mother died by suicide.

Village Chief Five Monkeys Shan, who spent the night with an opium-peddling courtesan, sleeps through the fire. At dawn, a worker reports the murders. Five Monkeys follows the blood trail to the inlet but cannot persuade anyone to dive into contaminated water. He dispatches Uncle Arhat to report to Magistrate Cao.

Uncle Arhat rides to the county town on market day. Unable to find the magistrate at the government compound, he locates him in the market square, where Cao is resolving a stolen-hen dispute with theatrical brilliance, ordering the hen’s crop cut open to prove ownership, then punishing the thief with 200 shoe-sole lashes and forcing the false witness to lick honey off the thief’s beaten buttocks. Uncle Arhat shouts that he has come to file a grievance.

Dai Fenglian arrives back at the Shan village and is escorted to the inlet, where Magistrate Cao has set up a makeshift court. The decomposing bodies lie under a willow tree, covered in crows. Uncle Arhat stands soaked from having dove into the inlet; hand grenades were needed to dislodge the corpses.

When told the dead men are her husband and father-in-law, Dai Fenglian faints, weeps, and spits blood. Impressed, the magistrate declares her innocent, accuses Five Monkeys Shan of the murders, and has him arrested. Under duress, Five Monkeys names Spotted Neck as the killer. The magistrate decrees Dai Fenglian inherits all Shan property.

Dai Fenglian then stuns everyone by claiming Cao is her real father who sold her during a famine. The bewildered magistrate agrees to be her foster-father. Three gunshots from the sorghum field, which match Spotted Neck’s “Three-Nod Phoenix” pattern, punch holes through Cao’s hat. He flees. Spotted Neck fires three more shots, killing Five Monkeys Shan, then emerges, confronts Dai Fenglian, and asks if Shan Bianlang bedded her. She says yes; he curses and disappears.

Dai Fenglian takes command of the estate: She orders coffins, buries the Shans, and sends Great-Granddad away with 20 buns, telling him Magistrate Cao is her father now. She addresses the workers, announcing Uncle Arhat will manage distillery affairs, and orders everything the Shans owned burned or buried. Over three days, the workers purge the compound, whitewash the walls, and create a fresh start for the distillery.

Ten days later, Dai Fenglian settles in and begins making paper cutouts: a katydid perched atop its opened cage and a deer with a plum tree growing from its back, bold images the narrator praises as proof of her artistic genius. As she cuts, the gate creaks open and a familiar voice asks if she is hiring.

The narrative returns to 1939. Commander Yu shakes the sleeping Douguan awake, pointing to 99 torches carried by several hundred villagers approaching along the riverbank. The crowd congratulates Commander Yu, but he falls to his knees, blaming himself for being tricked by Leng’s treachery. An old man rallies him, arguing that with 400 million Chinese, even staggering losses still mean victory.

The villagers gather 51 bodies from the fields, laying them in a row on the dike. “Mute’s” body is retrieved from a truck, still gripping his saber. Villagers follow Douguan into the sorghum and find Dai Fenglian face-up beneath the stars, sorghum seeds placed between her parted lips as if by doves.

Without coffins, Commander Yu buries everyone in the sorghum field. Dai Fenglian is the last interred; as dirt thuds against the sorghum covering her face, Douguan’s heart breaks permanently. The villagers kneel before the graves. At dawn, the villagers clear the bridge, pushing trucks into ditches, torching gas tanks, and dumping the wrecks in the river. The Japanese corpses are mutilated and thrown in the water. Commander Yu tries to drive the intact rice truck but crashes it into a ditch; he climbs out bloodied but grinning.

The novel flashes back 14 years earlier. Yu Zhan’ao arrives at Dai Fenglian’s compound and announces he is looking for work. She slaps him, grabs her scissors, and insists she has never met him. He plays along, and she sends him to the eastern compound.

Uncle Arhat hires him. After a month, Dai Fenglian gives him new shoes through Uncle Arhat. But Yu grows frustrated: Dai Fenglian visits daily yet ignores him. She hires the “woman Liu” and a teenager named Passion for the western compound, and adds five more dogs to the estate for security.

One night, drunk, Yu listens to workers gossip about the widowed mistress and drunkenly declares that he murdered the Shans and slept with Dai Fenglian. Sword in hand, he climbs the wall into the western compound but falls among the dogs. Dai Fenglian calls them off, summons Uncle Arhat, and beats Yu savagely with a willow switch. Yu begs for more lashes. From then on, Yu gets roaring drunk daily, lies on the firewood pile, and loudly claims the child in Grandma’s belly is his. Uncle Arhat urges her to fire him. Dai Fenglian dismisses his concern.

Dai Fenglian’s pregnancy becomes visible. She visits the distillery to observe the wine-making process. She tastes fresh wine for the first time and drains the ladle. Yu climbs off the firewood pile and urinates into a full crock of wine, then kisses Dai Fenglian and demands she acknowledge the child is his. She weeps and concedes. Transformed, Yu demonstrates extraordinary skill cleaning the distiller and proposes a technical innovation. Dai Fenglian returns to the western compound sobbing but no longer resisting. From that day on, they live together openly.

The urine-tainted crock is pushed into a corner, until one afternoon an unusually rich fragrance draws Uncle Arhat’s attention. He traces it to the crock, tests the wine, and rushes to Dai Fenglian with good news.

Dai Fenglian repeatedly refuses to entertain Great-Granddad. On his third attempt, he demands a black mule and threatens legal action. He rides to the county seat with a complaint accusing Dai Fenglian of harboring Spotted Neck. Magistrate Cao sees through his greed, gives him 50 lashes, then privately dispatches Little Yan with 10 silver dollars as consolation.

Cao tells Little Yan he is now convinced the man in Dai Fenglian’s bed is Spotted Neck. He devises a raid: Twenty soldiers will capture the bandit, but Dai Fenglian is to be left alone. At dawn, a soldier disguised as a peasant enters the compound to create a distraction. Little Yan’s men slip inside and seize Yu Zhan’ao. The soldiers shoot the dogs. Yu is tied across a horse and galloped to the county seat.

Cao greets him as “Spotted Neck” and orders 300 lashes. Yu protests: Spotted Neck has a white spot on his neck; his own is bare. The startled magistrate examines him and realizes the error but calls him a scoundrel for sleeping in a widow’s bed. Dai Fenglian arrives on her mule and barges into the main hall. That afternoon, Yu is sent home in a sedan chair. He convalesces two months on Dai Fenglian’s kang.

On the 23rd day of the 12th month in 1923, Spotted Neck’s gang kidnaps Dai Fenglian. Yu Zhan’ao pays double the ransom, and she is returned. In private, she tearfully admits Spotted Neck groped her breast.

In spring 1924, Yu buys two pistols in Qingdao and spends an entire spring shooting fish for target practice. He masters the “seven-plum-blossom skill,” shooting seven coins off a counter without marking the surface.

He rides to the old tavern and finds the dog-butcher dead. He continues into the sorghum, where bandits seize him and bring him to Spotted Neck’s camp. Yu plays the fool, acting cowardly and pretending he cannot swim. The bandits rescue him from near-drowning and lay him naked on the bank while they strip and go swimming.

Yu rises, picks up his pistols, and fires 14 shots, killing all the bandits in the water. Spotted Neck, the sole survivor, crawls ashore. Standing naked and fearless, he asks to be shot in the heart. Yu obliges with seven bullets.

The next morning, Yu and Dai Fenglian ride to Great-Granddad’s home. Yu stacks 10 silver dollars on the old man’s bald head and shoots them off two at a time. Dai Fenglian tosses 100 silver dollars onto the floor.

Yu and Douguan return to their razed home after the 1939 battle, retrieve hidden silver dollars, and disguise themselves as beggars. They buy 500 bullets in town, then hide out for days before slipping past the gate, planning to settle accounts with Leng.

Six days after the ambush, on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, they smuggle cartridges to the village inside a goat whose rectum they had sewn shut. Over 400 Japanese and 600 puppet soldiers have encircled the village. They fight a desperate battle in the sorghum field, but are vastly outnumbered. As night falls, villagers trying to break through the southern perimeter are cut down by machine guns, and hundreds are massacred, their bodies crushing the red stalks. The Japanese torch the village. The full moon hangs blood-red, then fades to a pale paper cutout above the inferno. Douguan asks where they will go now. There is no answer.