Map of the Ashen Calamity

**The seventeenth year of the Chongzhen reign. The land was shattered.**

News that Beijing had fallen and the Chongzhen Emperor had hanged himself on Coal Hill reached Jiangnan. Even Suzhou, where fine rain fell in endless threads, was shrouded in the gloom of the end times. Chen Mo, the owner of a painting and calligraphy shop, appeared to be a gifted painter, gentle and refined as jade. In truth, he was the sole survivor of a bloody massacre that had wiped out his family three years earlier. His loved ones had been slaughtered by the blades of the mysterious “Black Riders.” His father’s dying words, choked with blood and tears, “Blackwater… the key… don’t let them find it,” were branded into his very bones.

When half of a bloodstained jade pendant and a secret letter pointing to the hidden “Qianlong Abyss” in the Sichuan-Hubei borderlands unexpectedly fell into his hands, the peace Chen Mo had maintained in hiding for three years shattered in an instant. In his hands, a seemingly ordinary painting, "A Solitary Angler on a Cold River", revealed a cryptic **“Fragmentary Map of the Ashen Calamity.”** It was connected not only to the astonishing treasure Zhang Xianzhong had sunk into the river, and a replica of the Imperial Jade Seal that had mysteriously vanished during the Chongzhen reign, but also pointed directly to the monstrous mastermind behind the massacre!

**In troubled times, the world is a chessboard, and all people are pieces.**

The Qing court’s agents from the Adhesive Pole Office shadowed him at every turn. The Southern Ming envoy’s smiling face concealed hidden motives, while the blades of the remnants of the martial world lay in wait. Under the protection of a mysterious organization of survivors, danger lurked in every shadow… And in the darkness, the mastermind codenamed “Zhulong” was controlling the Black Riders, weaving a grand conspiracy to seize the treasure and the jade seal, and plunge the realm into turmoil.

Chen Mo entered the game alone, wielding his brush as a spear and his wits as a blade. He copied a fake map to deceive his enemies and set packs of wolves against one another. He deciphered deadly mechanisms and, in an abandoned secret fortress from the former Ming dynasty, uncovered truths buried for years: mountains of fine firearms, a replica of the jade seal so convincing it could pass for the real thing, and a revenge plot his father had drawn in blood… The complete map of the Ashen Calamity pointed toward