[Qing History and Republican-Era China] [Street Life and the Martial World] [Swindlers’ Schemes] [Warlords] [Ensemble Cast]
“Gold, appraisal, fortune-telling, and face reading; skin, troupe, tunes, and willows; bees, hemp, swallows, and sparrows; horizontal, kudzu, blue, and glory.”
The eight trades of the martial world, the dirty work of the lowest social classes: every last one reeks of a world where people are devoured without a trace.
In the early years of the Republic, Tianjin’s docks and ports were a chaotic mix of river and sea traffic.
The long-robed king of hell lorded over everyone. Child-snatchers abducted children without fear, while loan sharks bled their victims dry. In an age when human life was cheaper than grass, the honest were fair game for anyone who wanted to tear them apart.
To save his disabled junior sister, sixteen-year-old beggar Lu Changsheng drove a willow-leaf knife through his own left hand and plunged headfirst into this bottomless mire.
Everything under heaven is an illusion.
He made falsehood seem real, setting the “Swallow Carrying Mud” trap to draw every demon to his door.
He made others kill for him, laying the “Water Ghost Borrows a Life” formation to wipe out an entire bandit family!
From the muddy swamps of Nanshi to the foreign concessions of the French Concession, then onward to Fengtian beyond the passes, where the winds of change were rising.
This is the tale of a nobody from the bottom rung who used street cons and ancient tricks to rise step by step, turning himself into a warlord and upending the entire age of chaos.
“Rules? The silver dollars and knives in my hands, Lu Changsheng’s hands, are the rules at the mouth of the Nine Rivers!”
Can the author give me an autograph?