The Six-Fingered Demon Lute

The Six-Fingered Demon Lute is one of the most widely circulated representative works of Ni Kuang's wuxia writing. Serialized in Hong Kong's Wuxia World in the mid-to-late 1960s, the book combines the main story and its sequel into one whole. The story is set in a jianghu of vague dynasty and almost pure fantasy: legend has it that the "Heavenly Demon Lute" left by a lute demon of the Three Kingdoms, paired with the supreme art "Eight Notes of Heaven and Dragon," can destroy internal organs with invisible sound waves and slaughter a thousand people at once; whoever obtains it can dominate the martial world. Huang Dong, born with six fingers and peerless in both lute playing and martial arts, was a remarkable figure of the jianghu, yet because he possessed a rare treasure he was coveted and suppressed by the prestigious orthodox sects and could never clear his name. Driven to desperation, he took up the Heavenly Demon Lute and became the "Six-Fingered Demon Lute," taking revenge on those who had harmed him through lute music, and in the course of revenge went further and further, turning from victim into a butcher of the martial world. Lu Lin, young master of the Flying Tiger Escort Agency, is a youth just entering the jianghu; drawn into the struggle over the lute by a strange escort commission, he suffers a family tragedy and bears a blood feud, and ventures forth alone. He moves among masters both righteous and evil—Dongfang Bai, the Huashan sect leader Ancestor Liehuo, the Lord of the Seven Demons Tan Sheng, the Poison-Handed Rakshasa Hao Qinghua and others—seeing both the selfishness and infighting of the so-called orthodox sects and the courage and helplessness of those on the evil path, yet through repeated temptations and deadly traps he never covets the power of the demon lute. In the end, the scheming righteous and evil factions are forced to join hands, obtain the Fire Mystic Bow and Fire Feather Arrow that counter the Eight Notes of Heaven and Dragon, and besiege the Demon Lute together with young heroes such as Lu Lin and Tan Yuehua. With "the demon lute mirrors desire" as its mirror, the story depicts how greed and hatred devour a person step by step, and also the growth of young knights who keep their true hearts in a troubled world.