Zen Edge: Blood Bodhi in the Emperor’s Martial World

The day the realm fell into ruin, the emperor entered the monastery.

In the seventh year of the Xuanhe era of the Northern Song, Zhao Ji, the emperor known for his calligraphy and painting, shaved his head and became a monk at Mount Wutai. His abdication edict sent shockwaves through Bianjing. Stripped of his dragon robe, the emperor held bloodstained Buddhist prayer beads. Between the morning bells and evening drums, he sought not only the truths of Buddhism, but also the last secrets of the Great Song's imperial legacy. The head of Shaolin's Dharma Hall challenged the emperor's heart with a single-finger meditation technique. The Zhenwu Sword of Wudang's Zixiao Palace could not sever the grudges of the martial world. Jin spies' eagle claws swept over the glazed tiles of the temple, while Mongol cavalry had already brought their curved blades to its gates.

In this sacred Buddhist realm where the martial world's greatest masters gathered, the former Son of Heaven was forced to take up the blade of a demon. Shaolin's seventy-two supreme arts concealed the whereabouts of the imperial jade seal. A lost fragment of The Back-Pushing Diagram, unseen for a hundred years, appeared at a martial arts tournament. And a masked woman knocked on his meditation room door at night, bringing the truth about a bloody palace murder from twenty years ago. When Mongol cavalry trampled the frost and snow of Mount Wutai and the Jin state's preceptor laid an ambush on all sides, this "Buddhist disciple," gifted with peerless martial arts, would at last have to choose between the ancient Buddha beneath the lamplight and an empire stretching thousands of miles.

Set against the struggle for supremacy among the Song, Jin, and Mongol states, this novel unfolds a sweeping tale that fuses historical mystery with the martial world. Here are the emperor's schemes amid Shaolin's bronze men, romance amid Wudang's sea of clouds, and a contest for the realm with Mount Wutai as its chessboard. When the edge of Zen is stained with blood and the Bodhi tree becomes a blade, witness how an emperor in a chaotic age uses the martial world as a scabbard to conceal a lifetime of war and cut through the cycle of fate.