Bandits of the Marsh

Bandits of the Marsh is a long women-led wuxia novel by Priest, serialized on Jinjiang Literature City from November 2015 to May 2016, totaling about one million characters. The print edition, published by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, is divided into four volumes: Youth's Journey, Tower of Parting Sorrow, The Burden of Love, and Saving the Rivers and Mountains. The title comes from the Book of Songs, Airs of the States: "There is a gentleman of elegance, cut and polished, carved and ground," suggesting a process of self-completion through adversity. The story is set in an alternate era when the realm is divided between north and south and the martial world has decayed. Twenty years earlier, the Southern Blade Li Hui was ordered to become a bandit and built the Forty-Eight Strongholds in Shu, walled by mountains on three sides and a river on the fourth, sheltering the world's down-and-out and turning it into a haven amid chaos. Twenty years later, a youth calling himself Xie Yun enters the strongholds at night carrying the Peace Token, and their calm is shattered. Zhou Fei, descendant of the Southern Blade, has grown up in the stronghold and never seen the true martial world. After meeting Xie Yun, her fate veers off its original track. As the two descend the mountain and travel south, a cold case sealed for twenty years and the secret of "Sea and Sky as One Color" are peeled open layer by layer, and the young are forced to grow up amid turmoil and hard choices. The novel is built around Zhou Fei's growth: from a stubborn, proud girl ignorant of the world to a knight who can bear blade and responsibility alone. She and Xie Yun are equals in spirit and support each other, rather than one depending on the other. The work is widely regarded as a representative of women-oriented wuxia in online literature; it won the 2016 Novel Reading List Best Historical Romance and Best Plot awards, and was named to Douban's annual reading list in the fantasy literature category for domestic works. It was adapted into the 2020 TV series Legend of Fei.