In the sunset years of the Shao Dynasty, during the rule of the Yong Ping (永平, lit. translation: Eternal Peace) Emperor, official Cao Zhongkun usurped the throne in the Northern Capital, establishing a new, rogue Northern Dynasty. What remained of the Shao Dynasty’s royal family fled to the South, where a rival ‘Later Shao’ Southern Dynasty was established. In those turbulent times, ‘Southern Blade’ Li Zheng, renowned for his ‘Snow-Breaking Sabre’, was “made a bandit by imperial decree” of the Northern Dynasty. Under this banner of banditry, he established a fortress in the Shu Mountains, the ‘48 Zhai’, whose mission was to shelter the destitute, outcast and downtrodden.
Twenty years later, a young man named Xie Yun breaks into the 48 Zhai under cover of darkness, to deliver a message. Three years after this, Zhou Fei, the third-generation descendant of the ‘Southern Blade’, leaves the 48 Zhai on a mission. The young girl is swept into the tumultuous world of martial arts, as her path intertwines with Xie Yun’s. A secret buried for more than two decades will gradually come to light, as the murky martial arts world approaches a new dawn…
“A day will come – when you will leap across the silent flowing waters of the Ink-Washing River; depart from this mountainous utopia that is your home; and find yourself under a vast and shrouded night sky. You will see countless colossal mountains collapse, and immense seas dry up into desert. But remember this: your fate rests on the tip of your blade, and the tip of your blade must always point forward.”
Enormousheep 