Goluan

Author: Cheng Wei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: This is a new historical novel narrated by the renowned poet Cheng Wei with modern concepts, depicting historical facts. The story is set in the mid-Ming Dynasty, where the emperor was indulgent, eunuchs held power, and feudal princes sought to recreate the "purge the king's side" incident from the early Ming Dynasty. —When the painter Yin, the traveler Gui Wujie, and the assassin Li Cang arrived in the Southern Capital almost simultaneously. The hereditary imperial prince of the Southern Capital was planning a large-scale armed rebellion and was tormented by an ancient sword imbued with the secret desires of a previous life's curse. The sword had mentally castrated him in his dreams. The painter came to paint the queen and fell in love with the beautiful queen. The assassin came to assassinate the king but was instead targeted by the traveler as a dangerous object. The king's closest bodyguard and most intimate lover were in fact dangerous recumbents. Swordsmen, hermits, bandits, merchants, geishas, and martial artists from various paths converged in the Southern Capital, falling into the maze, and even the onlookers could not escape the image of their nightmare. At this moment, the king, the painter, the assassin, and the queen were all trapped in their own destinies. Killers and the killed, lovers and the beloved, bodies devoid of souls, merely beautiful; souls detached from the body, without any anchor. They entangled, lost, sank, and struggled with each other in their misalignment. On one side was the bloody slaughter, and on the other was the fragrant love. In the middle were the immense hesitation and vacillation of the king, the warrior, the beauty, and the scholar. The pain of castration was the century's pain of that era. An eunuch vented his personal hidden illness and hatred onto the virile men and tender women, in an era of swordsmen, he sought to make up for his eternal lack with a sword. Classical desires, love, plots, confusion reflected the darkness of the eunuch system, a tumor in feudal human society. A brand-new modern concept thened a conspiracy and transformation that was as magnificent as it was dirty, as confusing as it was violent, a flamboyant yet decadent sorrow, a riot of wounded flowers.