Afterword of the Knife-Lender

During the Chenghua reign of the Ming dynasty, strange omens appeared across the land and disasters and famine struck without end. A mysterious trade known as the knife-debt seller quietly emerged. Its practitioners traveled from street to street, offering kitchen knives and scissors on credit. They accepted no silver, leaving only a prophecy, and returned to collect payment once it came true.

Young Lu Hanchuan is forced to take on his family’s mantle as the last knife-debt seller in order to find his father, who disappeared many years ago. Carrying a basket of blades that gleam with a blue light, he wanders through towns and villages, only to discover that every prophecy is entangled with the secrets of the dynasty, folk legends, and forces stranger than he could imagine. From tales of human-faced fish amid the floods of Jiangnan to the mystery of the headless general during a drought in the northwest, from a palace witchcraft scandal to a blood moon at the border, Lu Hanchuan gradually uncovers the truth his lineage has guarded for a thousand years: they sell not knives, but the Way; they collect not money, but calamities.

When the final prophecy points to a shocking conspiracy at the summit of the Forbidden City, Lu Hanchuan must carve out a path of his own between fate and the human heart.