Every morning at the blacksmith’s shop in Luoxia Town, the hammer rings out in a rhythm of three heavy blows and one light one.
Ye Xi is the child adopted by Han Wujiu, the blacksmith. He has no known origins, no family history, only eight years spent working the bellows.
Then came the night cultivators slaughtered the town. His adoptive father gave his life to lock away a weighty secret in Ye Xi’s chest: inside him lay the remnant soul of the ancient Sword of Fate-Slaying. He was born with a sword embryo, a once-in-ten-thousand-years prodigy.
The Confucian scholar Song Lian took him on as a page and taught him the Vast Righteousness Scripture, along with the lesson: “First seek precision; only then consider what you’re willing to give up.” A girl from a fishing village, A Yuan, buried fish bones beneath a willow tree and said every fish had its own destination. The sword spirit Hong Xiu carried an old debt from a past life he could not remember, and entered his sword with a sharp tongue.
The Great Jing Dynasty wants to use him as a sword. Qingming Mountain wants to drive him into demonic cultivation. The old guard of the military clan wants him to repay a blood debt from thirty years ago.
Nine karmic locks bind his cultivation realm, and all the debts he owes. Break one, and he advances a realm; but each time, someone else bleeds in his place.
In a teahouse, he once heard a story: a swordsman slew a flood dragon, the fish scattered, and the fishing village went hungry for three years.
Was the swordsman wrong to slay it?
With a sword in hand, ask not the heavens, only your heart.
This is the answer Ye Xi found over the course of his life, and the direction of his final sword.
