Bloodstained Path: A Wuxia Novel

[Some debts are paid in blood. Others, in the courage to stop counting.

Wei Zilan was five years old when seven warriors came to her family's home in the name of justice, and left with nothing to show for it but two bodies and a child who was never supposed to survive.

Twenty-one years later, she has a plan. A strip of white cloth, written in her mother's blood, carries seven names. She has trained her whole life for this list, rehearsed each death so many times it no longer feels like a choice she's making, only one she's carrying out.

But vengeance rarely survives contact with the people it's aimed at.

The names on Zilan's list are not the monsters she spent two decades imagining. They are old men who kept gardens. Sect leaders who never stopped regretting. A servant who saved more lives than she ever knew. And as her path crosses with a sharp, quietly relentless Imperial Surveillance Bureau officer, and a seven-year-old orphan who refuses to be left behind, Zilan is forced to ask a harder question than any her training prepared her for:

What happens to a person after the debt is finally paid?

THE BLOODSTAINED PATH is a wuxia novel about grief that doesn't expire, justice that isn't as simple as a name on a list, and the strange, difficult grace of choosing to become someone new, for readers of character-driven martial arts fiction who want their sword fights to mean something.

A story of vendetta, mercy, and what grows after the fire.