The Blade Calamity of Zhaojing

In the twenty-seventh year of the Zhaojing era, The Demon Hub Bureau uses pills to forge bones, welding living people into cannons. In the foreign concessions, Western alchemists turn the dead into monsters. This is an age when even ghosts are starving to death. Xiaoti Gui doesn't want to starve, and he doesn't want to become a monster. He was once a rogue cultivator, but now he's just a mad dog in the Demon-Hunting Battalion. For silver dollars, ammunition, and his next bag of sweetened coffee, he can swing an infected Miao saber and bring himself to butcher his own kind. The court's zombie soldiers? Cut them down and refine their corpses into Yinfire. The foreigners' alchemical creations? Dismantle them for scrap metal. The mercenary blade-for-hire beside him? Anyone in his way gets killed. He has no faith in the Way of Heaven, no reverence for ghosts or gods, and no patience for nonsense like “equality between humans and demons.” Demons or foreigners, in his eyes, they're nothing but “big targets I haven't killed yet.” Only with a fast enough blade and blood hot enough in his veins can he survive this age of chaos, becoming a calamity by the sword, “hated by every person and dreaded by every ghost.” This is the story of a madman who carves out a way to survive with his blade in a world that devours people.