The Passion Sword

"The Passion Sword" is a long wuxia fantasy novel by the web novelist Xin Zai Liulang, roughly 590,000 characters long. It was serialized on Qidian Chinese Network in its early years, completed in May 2005, and was a contracted VIP work. The book is built around a peerless divine weapon called the "Passion Sword": legend says the blade senses the will of whoever holds it, gaining power from passion and bringing disaster through passion as well. The story begins when a scholar using the alias Ruoxu (also Hua Ruoxu) is drawn into the jianghu; he knows no advanced martial arts, yet because of this sword he is thrust into the jianghu's turmoil. The Huashan Sword Sect, the Tianyi Sword School, the Water Moon Palace, and other factions scheme openly and secretly over the divine sword, fighting without end. Through the theme of "passion lodged in the sword, the sword repaying passion," the author writes of romantic longing intertwined with jianghu grudges: Ruoxu meets and comes to know women of very different temperaments—Hua Yuluan, Jiang Qingyue, and others—in times of adversity, and is repeatedly tested amid sect feuds, the standoff between good and evil, and mysteries of his origins. The book is divided into volumes, their titles governed by paired short phrases; the first ten chapters mostly begin with the character "passion," the latter ten switch to beginning with "sword," forming the two threads of "Passion's Wound" and "Sword Spirit," and finally closing with the martial world returning to calm. The work has a distinct flavor of early web fiction: brisk pacing, dramatic twists, and multiple romantic threads running in parallel. It suits readers who want to revisit mid-2000s Chinese wuxia fantasy.