Martial Arts Empire

Martial Arts Empire is the second full-length novel by web novelist Xiaoqi Xiao, following The Iron Age. It began serialization on 17K.com in February 2009 and has been completed. The story is set in the northwest frontier at the end of the Yuan and beginning of the Zhou: in the remote town of Shibali Fort, a thin, dark-skinned orphan named Yuan Feng is taken in by Hu the Cripple, owner of a horse-meat shop, and lives a drab, lonely life, bullied by others. When the bandit leader Du Yidao and his men terrorize the townspeople and attempt to massacre the town, Yuan Feng kills him with precise, seasoned knife work, and his fate turns. He then grows from a frontier youth into someone caught up in the interests and rivalries of border-town caravans, private salt, and horse trading, and, following clues such as the relief portrait on an ancient silver coin, the blue lotus atop a snow mountain, and a mysterious testament of the Martial Emperor, gradually discovers a hidden connection between himself and the mysterious dynasty that overthrew the Mongols yet rose brilliantly and collapsed in an instant. How the young King of Xiliang uncovers the mystery of his origins step by step, and what world-shaking secret it reveals, is the novel's main thread. The work has the scope of alternate history but is not traditional wuxia: the author interweaves the jianghu, warfare, frontier scenery, and power struggles, and the protagonist rises through scheming, daring, and one hard-fought bloody battle after another, leading many readers to sum it up as a power-struggle power-fantasy in wuxia clothing. The book runs to about 1.27 million Chinese characters and has also been adapted into an online game of the same name; in May 2014, some chapters were published by Fujian People's Publishing House under the title The Lost Dynasty.