The Sword and Poetry Wanderer’s Record: The Ten Heroes of the Great Tang

When the Poet Immortal's sword cleaves chaos, wine turns to chains amid the immortal mist. When the Poet Sage's brush touches the lives of the people, sheets of paper seep with tears of blood like gold foil. When the Poet King's strings strike a chord in the human heart, the strings instead coil around the tendons of children. The Three Sages of the Tang shatter Penglai's illusion, unaware that chaos in Kunlun Ruins is gnawing at the bones of poetry, the iron teeth of the Mechanism City are grinding poetic souls to dust, and the chill of the far northern ice prison has already frozen the sound of verse. Blood-red poems fill the scarlet mist. Murky blue-violet qi corrupts masterpieces passed down through the ages. Deep-blue ice seals away the suffering of the people. They wield wine as fire, blood as ink, and pain as strings. They refine their souls on the Demon Isle, temper their bones in a sea of flames, and cry out against injustice in the ice prison, only to discover that the corrupted Book of Songs has become a puppet, the melted Songs of Chu have coalesced into fire crows, and the frozen Yuefu poems have turned into icicles. When the Primordial Brush rewrites the Immortal Canon of Penglai, when poetic power melts the iron prison of the Mechanism City, when warmth thaws ten thousand years of ice, the poetic souls of the Three Sages rise amid blood and fire. Meanwhile, the unfinished couplet, “Though ground and battered, still steadfast,” bursts through the paper from the ashes, foretelling an even more sinister ink prison in the heart of the Central Plains, waiting to bury the poetic soul of all the Tang with the resentment of its scholars.