Ask the Dust Guest

Nineteen years ago, a boat capsized on the Huai River. Xie Shouzhuo and his wife sank to the bottom of the river carrying a mysterious letter, leaving behind the infant Xie Qi. Nineteen years later, Xie Qi, a young man from a grocery store in Changling Town, was selling salt and vinegar day after day, guarding his grandfather's bloody and rusty knife. Until a rainy night, a group of black-clad swordsmen broke into the town. An old sword was delivered to the door of the grocery store, and a fish-patterned pendant emerged from the depths of the drawer. "Fish return to the sea, people return to dust." Grandfather's rusty knife, father's old sword, mother's jade pendant - three old things, bring out a past that has been sealed for nineteen years. Xie Qi took the girl next door Luo Qingfeng and the orphan Xiaofu on the road north. From Changling Town to Qingwei Town, from the south bank of the Huai River to the further north, we met various characters along the way: the old boatman who punted the boat, the anonymous doctor from the North, the old man who used the tea shop as a cover, the old Miao Zhu who hid in the dilapidated temple... Everyone has their own story, and each story points to where the letter should go. When the young man walked out of the small town, he realized that the world was not as black and white as written in the storybook. There are also ways to use the sword without unsheathing it, and there are times when people cannot go back home. The world is not only in the light of swords and shadows - in the heat of a bowl of noodles, in a red rope hanging on an old elm tree, and in the half-words left by every person who passes by.