The mountains and rivers preserve their traces of glory; our generation comes to visit again.
In the autumn of 1196, the Righteous Army of Shortblade Valley in Sichuan lost its treasured blade, the Grudge-Bearing Blade. This aroused the Jin dynasty's greed and sparked strife among the Song clans, stirring up a storm. From every corner of the land, heroes contended for the blade. In the end, through a chance meeting, the Grudge-Bearing Blade and the story's protagonist, Lin Shengnan, endured catastrophe after catastrophe until the blade found its master. For the first seventeen years of his life, Shengnan had suffered hardship because of his low birth. He had never imagined that this blade would completely change his fate. But taking on the blade's mission meant that both glory and calamity would soon descend upon him...
From the moment he took up the Grudge-Bearing Blade, he replaced its former master and inherited the lifelong responsibility of leading the Righteous Army against the Jin. With the blade in hand, he weathered one catastrophe after another. After the martial arts tournament at Cloudmist Mountain, he traveled far and wide, fighting in campaigns across the land. From the uprising in Quanzhou, to the chaos in Huainan, the upheaval in Huaibei, the battle in Kuizhou, and the expansion into western Guizhou, two years passed as he transformed the once talent-starved, fractured alliance against the Jin into an unbreakable force. Powerful enemies who had once watched hungrily from the sidelines, including the Jin's top ten fighters from north and south, Sichuan's bandits, and the demonic sects of western Guizhou, went from acting without restraint to living in constant fear. Every step of Lin Shengnan's transformation into Lin Qian was soaked in blood. It was agonizingly difficult, and spectacular beyond compare...
