The Canglan Glazed Record

In the first year of the Longqing era, the morning mist had yet to lift from Yuegang in Zhangzhou Prefecture when the martial world was already awash in bloodshed. Lin Luying, a carefree escort who grew up on the banks of the Jiulong River, never dreamed that a salted fish and half a sheet of gold foil would draw him into a world-shaking game spanning three oceans.

When Su Xiuyun, his childhood sweetheart and heir to the art of celestial navigation, meets Ailiya, a red-haired, green-eyed swordswoman from the West, the three cross paths at a dock steeped in the scents of ambergris and gunpowder. A silver-gilt teaspoon stirs the tides of the Seven Seas, a three-foot Western rapier cleaves a century-old fog, and Lin Luying's Canglang Saber still bears scales from the salted fish he used to fend off an assassin.

From the merchant guild's midnight pursuit in Yuegang to a gambling showdown aboard a ship in Malacca; from deciphering a star chart in a Ceylonese Buddhist cave to entrusting their lives to one another in a storm at the Cape of Good Hope. When the Nineteen Forms of the Canglang meet the breech-loading guns of the Folangji, and Minnan kung fu tea meets Porto wine, three souls cast adrift by fate touch upon a truth that transcends country and martial world, somewhere between a fallen veil hat and a broken glass hairpin.

This is an adventure where an embroidered needle calms the storm and a compass unravels the mystery. It is also a rollicking legend that turns martial-world conventions upside down and redefines true love in the evening breeze of the Western Regions. When the morning bells ring at a Lisbon church, they will finally understand: the most precious treasure has never been at the destination marked on a sea chart, but right there by the porthole, sharing a pot of Tieguanyin.

Later, his descendants will return to the Ming dynasty carrying on his aspirations, and embark on a series of delightful adventures in the martial world.