A man with nothing left adopts a girl nobody wanted and decides that's worth more than survival. The film moves like it's racing against time itself, cramming twenty hours of story into two, but that desperation becomes the point, Van's sprint to protect her before the empire catches up is the whole emotional weight. Studio Ghibli could have made this, except Ghibli would have let you breathe between scenes instead of chasing you through a collapsing world frame by frame.

Years after a vicious war in which the Zol Empire conquered neighboring Aquafa, former soldier Van Gansa labors as a prisoner of war in a salt mine run by Zol authorities. One night a pack of wild dogs tears through the mine, and Van and a young girl named Yuna, though both bitten, escape as the only survivors. The dogs turn out to carry Black Wolf Fever, a deadly illness people believed was gone. Free at last, Van settles with Yuna in a quiet farming village, unaware he is being followed. Some pursuers want his blood to cure the fever, others want to stop them at any cost, and to protect Yuna, Van must learn the true cause of the plague and whether it can be cured. The film is an action fantasy drama adapted from a novel series by Uehashi Nahoko.