During the Wanli era, Lin Yan, a young boy from Huaibei, lost his father and was left alone after his mother remarried. He suffered constant bullying at the hands of local gentry and tyrants. When he was eight, his grandfather’s sworn brother, the renowned martial artist Chu Changfeng, found him and led him into a world of flashing blades.
Lin Yan inherited his family’s secret techniques and mastered peerless martial arts, but scorned the hypocritical rules of the orthodox sects. Willful and ruthless, he acted on his own sense of vengeance and justice, becoming a “tyrant” feared by everyone in the martial world. His notorious name spread far and wide.
When the imperial court laid a deadly trap to wipe out the martial world, it was this man, burdened with a lifetime of infamy, who stood alone before the execution ground and rescued every fellow martial artist in danger. In the end, he gave his life and fell beneath a storm of arrows.
A lifetime of infamy, a heart of chivalry. The world called him scum, never knowing that beneath his ruthlessness beat the heart of a true hero, untouched by corruption.
It's a good book, worth reading. The titles of each chapter are very clever.