Isla, a island maiden who has all the males, including her father, lusting after her. Her dream was to leave her primitive surroundings and find another life in the big city. However, it would not be easy. To be able to escape, she must use her body to pay off all the men who would help her.

The fortunes of three impoverished friends and their families abruptly change after an airplane crashes in a nearby mountain. They rush to the crash site along with all the villagers, not to help the victims but to plunder their valuables. A dead American passenger carried a large amount of money in his briefcase which Mesiong, Ponsoy, and Jamin find and avariciously keep for themselves. But the town mayor gets greedy and with his hirelings abducts the three to divest them of their booty.

Crispin is a soltero who has undergone several heartbreaks with women, broken family ties, and his own personal conflicts. In his evolution as a man, he shows his weakness, his strengths, his confusion.

When plain orphan Elsa begins having visions of the Virgin Mary, the rest of the residents of her isolated village find themselves questioning their own beliefs and values. Soon, Elsa is healing people with a variety of ailments. As word of this phenomenon spreads, tourists, pilgrims, patients and a documentary filmmaker all arrive on a quest to partake in the miracle.

The story follows the Lorenzos and the Ojedas, the two land-owning clans in the island province of Negros, who were trying to cope and survive the war that lasted three tumultuous years, where they experienced or witnessed violence, blood, horror, and death. It is structured into three parts: Oro, a life of luxury and comfort in the city; Plata, a still-luxurious time of refuge in a provincial hacienda; and finally, Mata, a toilsome retreat deeper into the mountains. A war not only turned them into miserable people but also turned them into animals.