The Rivers and Lakes of the Four Seas

Four Seas, One Jianghu is a twenty-year retrospective told from the first-person perspective of "I," Chu Sihai, a young man from Luancheng.

As a boy, Chu Sihai was timid and weak-willed, yet obsessed with martial arts stories. He grew up aimlessly in the streets and alleys of Luancheng, once cruelly bullying the girl next door, Shen Mengxue. He left that youthful malice behind, but over the years it grew into a debt he could never repay. Later, he plunged headlong into the jianghu. There were no cheat-like powers or miraculous encounters, only hardship and struggle. The brothers who had once fought by his side were dead, crippled, or scattered. Fate struck him again and again: his father died when he was five; in the bitter winter when he was twenty-two, his mother passed away from illness after years of hard work; at twenty-three, Shen Mengxue, the woman he had once hurt, became his wife, only to die in childbirth; and at twenty-four, in the provincial capital, his biological brother Chu Jianghe took a fatal blade meant for him and died on the spot.

Family, love, and brotherhood were extinguished one after another. A lifetime of folly left him burdened with regret. After one parting of life and death after another, the young man from Luancheng who had once believed the jianghu was a place for settling scores and living freely was left alone, carrying a debt he could never repay, drifting through the world by himself. This is the story of Chu Sihai and Li Zhenyun, Lin Yi, Ye Liangchen, Gu Changci, and many others.