Beneath the palace eaves that reached the ninth heaven, he once gazed up at a formation of wild geese, his sword tassel still tied to a young man's ambition.
At nineteen, Lu Chengyuan, Crown Prince of Eastern Qin, snapped the jade hairpin from his ceremonial crown, chasing nothing more than a flickering fishing light deep in the martial world. His silver-saddled steed flashed past the moonlit Twenty-Four Bridges, but at the height of the Qiantang tide, a bloodstained carrier pigeon brought him a message: the Empress's clan had stormed the imperial city, and the head of his closest friend was already hanging from the Vermilion Bird Gate. His blade cleaved through frost and snow, as the young wanderer broke the ten-year vow of seclusion he had made at Mount Xiaocang.
The carefree traveler who had watered his horse by the Luo River eventually accepted the dust-stained robes of state before the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Power seared into his palm like a branding iron, and only then did he understand that the martial world was more than misty rain and skiffs: it also hid blades and bloodshed. The gray wolf banners of the northern frontier snapped in the wind, witchcraft from the southern border stirred beneath the imperial capital, and within the ink-black clouds rolling over the city, thunder slumbered, powerful enough to topple a century-old dynasty.
He crushed the clan emblems of twelve great houses, broke the Western Liang king's wolf-headed staff, and burned the myriad-insect caverns of Nanzhao to the ground. Yet he kept his old friend's Yuchang Sword hanging forever in the Imperial Ancestral Temple. When the Empress's clan was wiped out, the Western Liang king's tent burned crimson at Yanmen Pass, and the bone flute of Nanzhao's shaman shattered beside Dian Lake, he rehung seven old swords on the Observatory. The sharpest sword belongs in its sheath, guarding the realm.
“The martial world has always lived in the smiles of the people.”
