Cold Blade Drinking Snow: The Last Farewell Letter of the Martial World

Shen Yanqiu knelt on the blue-gray flagstones of Beilin Temple, her fingertips brushing the newly erected blank tombstone. Buried beneath it was her master, the man known throughout the martial world as “Mr. Mo, whose brush decides life and death.” Three days earlier, someone had driven a seven-inch silver needle through his pipa bone in the Sutra Repository. With his dying breath, he had only managed to write one word in her palm: “Snow.”

She carried half of a fragmentary map against her chest, which she had found in her master’s sleeve. A winding mountain range was drawn on it in cinnabar, and a faded seal marked its corner: “Northern Frontier Army.” Shen Yanqiu could not understand how an old scholar who loved copying sutras at the temple and could barely hold a sword had anything to do with the Northern Frontier Army, which had been wiped out thirty years ago.

Even more alarming, someone stole her master’s body in the dead of night.

With the map in hand, she went down the mountain. Her first stop was “Ghost Market,” the most lawless place in Chang’an. Rumor had it that the market’s proprietress, Granny Night, knew everything under the heavens, but demanded the most precious thing one possessed in exchange. Shen Yanqiu had little left to lose, except for the wolf-hair brush her master had left her.

Granny Night took the brush, her withered fingers rubbing the cracks in its handle. “Mr. Mo was once the Northern Frontier Army’s ‘military scribe.’ He kept records of the army’s deepest secrets. Someone feared he would write what happened back then into The Supplement to the History of the Realm. They killed him to erase the evidence.” She handed Shen Yanqiu a bronze token engraved with the word “Snow.” “Go find the master of Snow Tower. He owes Mr. Mo a life.”

Snow Tower stood deep in the Zhongnan Mountains. Its master, Xie Linzhou, was a man who wore a dark cloak all year round...