In the year 1031 AD, Zahn, an adventurous Song Chinese trader, keeps going north after trading with Japan and Korea, following the currents North and West into new lands. There he finds new civilizations, with valuable trade goods. He builds relationships with the native peoples as he travels down the West coast of what is now North America. Those bonds are cemented when he accidentally introduces smallpox in bolts of Japanese silk, and a village is effectively wiped out.

            Zahn has found a better world than the one he came from. He desperately wants to protect it from the greedy and brutal worlds across the waters, where life has no value, and death is a currency. If he cannot equip his new people to stand against the old worlds, their lands will be devoured, and their people enslaved, for that is the way the old civilizations stay alive and the powerful thrive.