The Game of Watching Go

Guanyi Mountain governs the world’s three orders: the martial path, the official path, and the mercantile path. Their three branches stand apart, each with its own mission, balancing the realm and bringing peace to its people. Each path has a rightful heir, who governs the martial world, the imperial court, and the city’s commercial networks respectively. They should have stood together to protect the world and preserve the peace. Their ancestral ironclad rule is the one commandment: play the game to preserve, never to destroy. But at some point, the game of the Way of Strategy was overturned. Someone abandoned preservation for chaos, secretly changed its original purpose, and began using all the people of the realm as pieces on a board, deliberately plunging the world into turmoil. In a single night, the seventy-two water strongholds of Hanjiang were wiped out without provocation, and their women and children were abducted. There was no profit to be gained and no old score to settle. The attack was solely intended to disrupt the balance. The goal was to shatter the balance among the three paths, forcing their three guardians into the game and placing each under pressure, tearing apart the peace of the world. From then on, the heirs of the martial path, the official path, and the mercantile path entered the world one after another: a martial hero, a high-ranking court official, and a wealthy merchant. One would tame the martial world through force, one would steady the currents beneath the imperial court, and one would quell the chaos in the cities. Their three paths would echo across the land, balancing one another and working together in secret. In this vast game of turmoil spanning the realm, they would hold fast to Guanyi Mountain’s original purpose of preserving the Way, oppose the hidden hand manipulating the world into chaos, and, each embodying one of the three paths, turn the tide and save the collapsing realm. This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.