This novel is about the HIV epidemic that engulfed many provinces in China in the early 1990s, when the government decided to develop its own plasma market and launched the "donor economy" campaign. Numerous "blood collection points" opened across the country, and villages appointed "blood elders." Tempted by the slogan "Donate blood and get rich," impoverished peasants rushed to donate blood and were widely infected with HIV due to unsanitary conditions. After some time, a devastating, deadly wave of the epidemic swept across the country, wiping out entire villages. The book is the result of three years of the author's undercover work — by becoming an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist, he gained the opportunity to study the history of one of the extinct villages.