During the Jiajing era, Japanese pirates ravaged the southeast, leaving the coast in turmoil and the people in misery. Liu Shouyuan, a boy from a fishing village, had been happily living under his parents' care. Then a sudden massacre at Baishi Beach burned his home to the ground and killed his loved ones. Amid the flames and bloodshed, he fled for his life, carrying the dark jade pendant his parents had protected with their lives and the earth-shattering secret entrusted to him on his deathbed by Uncle Chen from the ancestral hall.
Adrift at sea, he endured hunger, thirst, storms, and relentless pursuit by pirates, surviving one brush with death after another. Then he washed up at a salt works, where he experienced life's cruelty and warmth, suffering abuse and humiliation as he struggled to survive. By chance, he met Zhao Tieying, a mighty general of the Loyal and Righteous Army, and joined their anti-pirate stronghold at Qiyun Hollow. Military life tempered him, steel and blood forged his bones, and he learned the Iron Garb Art and the skills of killing. But during the battle at Yingchou Ravine, mysterious men in black ambushed them while they were escorting supplies. The Loyal and Righteous Army's elite forces were wiped out. Zhao Tieying stayed behind to protect Liu Shouyuan and the immensely important jade pendant, fighting to the death. With his dying breath, he gave a blood-curdling warning: “There’s a traitor… inside the Loyal and Righteous Army!”
The young man carries a deep blood feud, a bloodstained copy of the Qi-Nourishing Manual, and a jade pendant of unfathomable mystery. Bearing the last wishes of the dead and an unresolved, earth-shaking secret, he presses on through suspicion and loneliness. What awaits him? The Japanese pirates' grim blades, the court's turbulent undercurrents, the shifting currents of the martial world, and, above all, the astonishing legacy of Mohist mechanisms and Daoist mystic arts tied to the pendant.
His lone sail has receded into the distance, and his sword has just begun to be tempered. Liu Shouyuan has embarked on a path of revenge paved with blood and fueled by hatred, as well as an extraordinary journey to honor the dead and unravel an ancient mystery. With war fires blazing across the southeast and sword energy soaring into the heavens, can the young man hold fast to his principles amid the raging tides of a chaotic age, treading as if on the edge of an abyss and on thin ice, and finally cut through the fog to cleanse the world?
