Cold Soul Valley (New Tales of the Shu Mountain Swordsmen Series)

This is one of Zhu Louzhu's finest wuxia novels, part of the New Tales of the Shu Mountain Swordsmen series. Its winding, moving plot rises and falls dramatically, and once the Dragon-Slaying Hand appears, readers will be unable to put the book down. Xinjiang is a vast region of towering terrain, with the Tianshan Mountains running across it and dividing the whole area in two: the region south of the mountains is called Southern Xinjiang, and the region to the north is called Northern Xinjiang. The main peak, Khan Tengri, rises more than 8,300 zhang. The mountain range winds across the province, with peaks and ridges, cliffs, caves, ravines, and streams numbering in the thousands. Many places within are enchanting landscapes of extraordinary beauty, as lovely as fairyland. Yet this is a remote land of great deserts and desolation, where flying sand blots out the sky and snow blankets the wilderness. The Gobi's shifting sands add further danger. For generations, people in the Central Plains have regarded it as a distant frontier, and travelers have feared the journey. Apart from the merchant guilds of Hunan, Tianjin, Shanxi, and Gansu, ordinary people rarely ventured there, much less set out specifically to explore the northern and southern Tianshan, seek out its wonders, and climb its peaks to sing into the wind. Most people believe that the Tianshan are perpetually snowbound and bitterly cold, their summits capped with black ice that has never melted since time immemorial. The mountains are so steep that even apes and birds can scarcely climb or fly across them. Beyond their dazzling snow, which reaches up to meet the sky and looks magnificent from afar, they are thought to have little to offer. What is more, the Gobi and its shifting sands lie between them and the outside world, often stretching for hundreds or even thousands of miles without a soul in sight. The journey is not only arduous, and the ascent difficult, but also fraught with sandstorms, thirst, and the danger of frostbite. So people turn back before they begin. Since ancient times, Xu Xiake is the only person who set out specifically to travel among the mountains. Yet by the account in his travel journals, he covered only a little more than half of their outer slopes. He left no record of the many enchanting places deep in the mountains. Perhaps he had been warned by the mountain folk, who say,