In the late Qing and early Republican era, warlords divide the land and martial arts are in decline. Peng Zimu, a down-and-out scholar with a weakness for women, drunkenly wanders into a deserted shrine and cuts a bloodstained silk manuscript from an ancient corpse’s belly: the Heavenly Dipper Reversing Blade Art, a technique that lets its practitioner cleave bullets in two. First, he is seized by the warlord Bai Lang’s army and forced into service. Then, after transcribing a military manual, he is hailed as a strategist, only to be betrayed and escape death by a hair’s breadth. His former classmate Shen Guhong sees him as a degenerate and humiliates him at every turn. The warlords treat him as a pawn, discarding him when he is no longer useful. The women he has wronged each have their own designs. A blade is a weapon for killing, and the martial world devours the weak. Peng Zimu doesn’t want to be a hero. He just wants to survive. Yet in a chaotic age, the one who makes it to the end is, of all people, someone like him.
