In the thirty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign, blood stains the southeast. His Daoist heart is clouded, and a solitary lamp ventures out to sea.
Yun Yi grew up amid the tolling of bells and the chanting of scriptures. He was the purest disciple at the Xujing Temple on Mount Qixia. He practiced the Flowing Cloud sword style, hoping not to startle even falling snow, and cultivated herbs, hoping to save lives and help the world. Then a bloodstained letter bearing the last words of a slaughtered family shattered the mountain temple’s peace.
On the twenty-second day of the twelfth lunar month, Japanese pirates raided Cixi under cover of night. Thirty-two of his closest relatives hid in a secret room beneath the ancestral hall, but one infant’s cry betrayed them, and they were all slaughtered. His father survived by pretending to be dead. After sending the blood letter, he hanged himself from a charred beam in the ancestral hall.
Ten years of faith collapsed in a single night.
Yun Yi took off his Daoist crown, slung a long sword across his back, and set foot in his homeland, swallowed by blood and fire. What lay before him was not only charred earth and dismembered bodies, but also the four words his father had glimpsed at the cost of his life: pirates, collaborators, provisions, weapons. The foreign invaders were brutal, their local accomplices treacherous, the defenses in disrepair, and the people’s morale shattered.
The path of vengeance was not as simple as answering a sword with a sword. The pirates at sea were elusive, while hidden hands lurked ashore. The grain-shop owner he had known for years might be a spy working with the enemy; the demoralized soldiers at the garrisons had long since lost the courage to wield their blades.
He had to become a hunter in the dark, find a way to survive in a world awash with blood, and seek an answer:
When a pure land has become a living hell, should he cling to his vow not to kill and let his enemies go free? Or should he wield a deadly blade and become a demon of slaughter, fighting killing with killing and washing blood away with blood?
Could the heart-lamp he brought from the temple illuminate this boundless sea of blood? And at the end of the slaughter, could it help him find peace within himself?
This is one man’s war. His enemies are brutal Japanese pirates, a rotten world, and his own heart, sinking deeper with every step.
