Song of the Emerald Sea Sword

Song of the Emerald Sea Sword is an original ancient-setting wuxia romance serialized on Jinjiang Literature City by author Liu Sha. Approximately 450,000 characters long and now complete, it unfolds around the legend of the Six Divine Swords: each blade is said to hold its own secret, and their very origins form a riddle no jianghu wanderer has ever solved. Desert clans, the Sword Palace of southern Yunnan, and the famed First Tower of Jiangnan—among other factions—contend for them amid a tottering world. The heroine, Ye Tingtao, carries one of the six swords, the Emerald Sea Wrath Spirit Blade. Cold, spare of speech, ruthless in her strikes, and untraceable in her comings and goings, she seems to others forever bound for some more pressing matter ahead. To fulfill her master's charge and trace the riddle of the swords that has defied solution for a thousand years, she wears indifference as a mask, threading her way through countless feuds and quarrels. On the road she encounters the novice swordsman Xue Lingzhou and the enigmatic qin player Chu Yusheng, and is drawn into the old affairs of the Xue clan; Chu Yusheng thereafter becomes her comrade in life and death. Meanwhile, the open and covert struggles among Yi Tower, Sword Lake Palace, and the visitors from the vast desert escalate layer by layer. The work is chiefly structured in two volumes—Volume One, 'Flying Spring, Night Rain, Xiaoxiang Song,' and Volume Two, 'Ten-Storey Tower, Song Terrace at Dusk'—with additional side-story chapters. The author notes that the protagonist's romance is a slow burn and the plot likewise unfolds at a leisurely pace, the emphasis falling on the bonds and attachments of jianghu folk—as the author puts it: 'Without attachments, it would not be your jianghu.'