The story is set at the times of Peter the Great’s reforms when an emerging empire was wreaking havoc on provincial medievalism in the dense boreal forests. That times were the melting pot of everything — of beliefs and nations. The history of Russian Asia was made by captive Swedes, outlanders, Bokharan merchants, civil servants and officers, convicts, architects and chroniclers, Chinese smugglers, shamans and escaped dissenters, Orthodox missionaries and warlike steppe-dwellers Dzungars.