Ningbo, the twenty-seventh year of the Jiajing reign.
The Lu family’s ship, which had been at sea for months, has finally returned.
The cargo is there, the silver is there, and the crew is there. Only the ship’s owner, Lu Shouqian, is missing.
Stranger still, the three sailors each tell a completely different story about how he disappeared.
Nineteen-year-old Lu Ying only wants to find her father, but a discrepancy in the accounts leads her into the maritime world that arose after Shuangyu fell. Merchants, officials, shipowners, ronin, smugglers, and armed seafarers are all tangled in the same web. In the end, every trace her father left behind points to two words: Wufeng.
She gradually realizes that perhaps her father never disappeared at all.
He chose to leave.
From Ningbo to the East China Sea, from the ashes of Shuangyu to the Wufeng maritime realm, and then on to the Japanese pirate raids that swept across the southeast and the opening of maritime trade under the Longqing Emperor, what Lu Ying ultimately seeks to reclaim is not only her father, but a name of her own.
