Poetry and Blade

Poetry and Blade is a historical web novel by Zhu Jiada Lang, serialized on Qidian.com from February 6, 2018, and completed on March 14, 2019. It runs to 451 chapters and about 1.513 million characters. The work won the Damanzong Historical Writing Award. The story is set in an alternate-world time-travel premise. The protagonist, Xu Jie, is a modern man who travels back in time and becomes the son of a farming family. Clever from childhood, he has both the talent for reading and composing poetry and a mastery of martial arts. The Xu family inherited land from an old soldier ancestor; though comfortably off, the household declined after misfortunes befell the father's generation. Xu Jie therefore leaves home and enters the jianghu, carrying a long blade to right wrongs and meeting and clashing with all manner of martial-world figures; with the pen in his hand and the scholarship in his breast, he also establishes himself at court, striving to root out abuses and carry out reform. The novel's skeleton is the interweaving of two lines, "jianghu" and "court": on one side the flash of blades and the grudges of chivalry, on the other scheming and the rise and fall of the throne room. With the core image of "a blue robe, a long blade, a life of freedom and ease," the author writes of Xu Jie's growth and choices in a troubled age, and of a reformer weathering storms and witnessing rise and decline. The prose is leisurely, emphasizing character interaction and sentiment, and is regarded as a historical time-travel novel with a strong wuxia flavor.