Futile Devices Scans

BA – Blade Against the Current

By: Xiang Xiaomo

Native Title: 逆水横刀 by 香小陌

Genres: Action, Adult, Drama, Mature, Mystery, Psychological, Romance, Yaoi

Tags: Beautiful Male Lead, Clever Protagonist, Crime, Criminals, Enemies Become Lovers, Family Secrets, Gangs, Hidden Identity, Loyal Subordinates, Modern Day, Organized Crime, Past Trauma, Revenge, Schemes and Conspiracies, Strong Couple, Strong Love Interests, Strong Protagonist, Underworld, Violence

Content: 132 Chapters including Extras

Status: Upcoming Translation

Synopsis:

Yan Xiaodao has spent most of his life learning one very simple lesson:

If fate knocks you down, get back up.

If someone tries to kill you, preferably get back up with a knife.

Born without knowing who his parents were, Yan Xiaodao—real name Yan Xiao—grew up with very little except a stubborn ability to survive. His childhood was marked by poverty, hard labor, and enough misfortune to have crushed someone less difficult to kill.

What eventually changes his life is Qi Baoshan.

Qi Baoshan becomes his godfather, pulls him out of desperate circumstances, and gives him a place in a world that exists somewhere between legitimate business and the underworld. Yan Xiaodao grows into one of the men at his godfather’s side: formidable, loyal, frighteningly good with a blade, and accustomed to handling problems that cannot exactly be reported to the police.

Years later, that loyalty sends him aboard a luxury ship on an unusual assignment.

He is supposed to keep one man alive.

That man is Ling He.

Ling He is beautiful enough to make people forget that beautiful things can also be poisonous.

When Yan Xiaodao first encounters him, Ling He appears to be a vulnerable man caught in an ugly game played by wealthy and powerful people. Yan Xiaodao gets him out, brings him under his protection, and gradually discovers that the mysterious beauty he rescued is intelligent, sharp-tongued, calculating, and considerably less helpless than he seems.

Yan Xiaodao knows Ling He is hiding things.

He simply does not yet understand how many.

Because their meeting was never an accident.

Ling He came carrying a fifteen-year-old blood debt.

Behind his carefully constructed weakness lies a man who has spent years preparing for revenge, and among the people standing on the other side of that revenge is the very man Yan Xiaodao considers family.

His godfather.

From that moment, what should have been a rescue becomes a trap neither man can easily escape.

Yan Xiaodao is indebted to Qi Baoshan for changing his life. Loyalty is not an abstract principle to him; it is something built from hunger, survival, brotherhood, and years of shared history.

Ling He, meanwhile, has his own dead to answer for.

He did not survive the past merely to forgive it.

And unfortunately for both of them, somewhere between deception, suspicion, protecting each other, fighting each other, and repeatedly discovering that the person standing in their way is also the person they cannot bear to lose—

they fall in love.

This does not improve matters.

At all.

Their relationship becomes a collision between two extraordinarily stubborn men who are each capable of understanding the other perfectly right up until that understanding requires either of them to surrender.

They rescue each other.

They deceive each other.

They threaten each other.

They seriously injure each other.

They take each other captive.

And even while apparently standing on opposite sides of a blood feud, they remain spectacularly incapable of allowing anyone else to hurt the other.

For Yan Xiaodao, the central question becomes increasingly unbearable:

What happens when the person who once saved your life and the person you now love cannot both remain on the same side?

For Ling He, the question is just as cruel:

If revenge is the reason you survived, what happens when completing it means destroying the man who has become more important to you than revenge itself?

The deeper they dig into the old case, however, the less straightforward the past becomes.

Old murders connect to powerful families, buried identities, corrupt interests, underworld alliances, police investigations, and people who have spent more than a decade ensuring that certain truths remain hidden.

The enemies standing before them may not be the same enemies they began with.

And eventually, two men who have spent a considerable portion of the novel fighting one another discover that they are substantially more terrifying when they finally turn around and fight on the same side.

Blade Against the Current is a modern fictional-underworld danmei built around a strong-versus-strong romance, revenge, crime, family loyalty, conspiracy, and two adult men with enough emotional baggage to require an additional vehicle.

Yan Xiaodao is the rougher of the pair: a resilient former underworld fighter whose life has taught him loyalty, pragmatism, and the usefulness of carrying knives.

Ling He is the beautiful one.

This should not be mistaken for the harmless one.

Their romance is very much enemies-to-lovers in the literal sense: attraction does not prevent them from opposing one another, and love does not magically make their competing loyalties disappear. Their conflicts become physical and sometimes brutal before the two eventually begin uncovering the larger truth together.

The story also contains a substantial crime and conspiracy plot beyond the central romance, along with an ensemble of underworld figures, police officers, wealthy families, loyal subordinates, enemies, old friends, and a secondary couple involving Xue Qian and Liang Youhui.

Despite the knives, kidnapping, blood feuds, and attempted murder, the novel also has plenty of banter, domestic scenes, ridiculous side characters, dogs, jealousy, and moments in which two supposedly formidable men demonstrate that being able to survive the criminal underworld does not necessarily qualify either of them to conduct a normal romantic relationship.

It is 1V1 and has a Happy Ending.

Content Note:

The novel contains organized crime, graphic violence, serious injuries, murder, abduction and confinement, revenge, corruption, sexual exploitation involving adult characters, past trauma, and characters deliberately inflicting physical harm on one another.

The central couple’s relationship includes genuine physical conflict and morally complicated behavior from both sides. This is very much a “love each other, fight each other, nearly kill each other, then eventually fight everyone else together” kind of romance.

Series / Shared Universe:

Blade Against the Current belongs to Xiang Xiaomo’s Strong-Strong Revenge Trilogy (强强复仇三部曲).

The stories share a broader universe and related characters may appear across works, but their central plots are designed to stand independently.

Volume 1: 逆水横刀 — Blade Against the Current

Related Side Story: 醉拳 — Drunken Fist

Volume 2: 与敌同眠 — Sleeping with the Enemy

Main Couple:

Ling He × Yan Xiaodao (Yan Xiao)

A revenge-driven, beautiful and dangerously calculating man × an underworld wanderer who has been beaten down by fate repeatedly and simply refuses to stay down.

Or, more concisely:

One came looking for revenge.

The other was standing between him and his enemy.

Falling in love was extremely inconvenient.

One-Sentence Summary:

Two men begin on opposite sides of a fifteen-year-old blood feud, nearly destroy each other trying to protect what they cannot surrender, and eventually discover that revenge works considerably better when they do it together.

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