The Legend of the Great Banner Heroes

The martial world has a short memory, but some marks are as deep as brands from a hot iron. A tattered black banner, stained with dark red blood, has resurfaced, and its appearance sends shock waves through the entire martial world. The banner belonged to the Iron-Blooded Banner Sect, wiped out overnight twenty years ago. Legend has it that it can rally the sect's surviving followers and is tied to a secret treasure powerful enough to shake the world, as well as an unparalleled martial art no one has ever seen. Tie Zhongshi is a down-and-out wanderer of mysterious origins, spending his days drinking cheap liquor. He had planned to muddle through life, but the storm finds him one rainy night. His dying benefactor presses half of the broken banner into his hands, binding him to a bloody vendetta and a responsibility he cannot refuse. He wants no part of the martial world, but its flashing blades have already closed in around him. The first to stand by his side is his only friend, Wang Xiaoxian, the young leader of the Divine Dragon Cult. Wang Xiaoxian ventures into the treacherous Central Plains not for the banner, but to find his beloved, Liu Piaoxue, the “Nine Cords Flying Bells,” who has mysteriously vanished. One seeks to unravel his own fate, the other to pursue the woman he loves. Together, Tie Zhongshi and Wang Xiaoxian set out on a thorn-strewn road of no return. Murderous danger lurks everywhere, and Liu Piaoxue is far more than an extraordinary woman of the martial world... Tie Zhongshi must face his inner fears and wield his blunt, unsharpened sword. The enemies before him are not his only challenge: he must also confront a shocking conspiracy, twenty years in the making, capable of devouring the entire martial world. A small black-iron token engraved with the words “Shadows fall on the Western River; a lone swan crosses north” suddenly appears, foreshadowing that the struggle over the banner is only the prologue to a far greater and darker story.