By Blood, Ink & Salt

A historical reimagining of Shek Ying—Zheng Yi Sao—and the red-sailed maritime world she helped reshape. Authority is negotiated through codes, loyalties, memory and force, while the novel keeps returning to the question of who gets written into history and who disappears between its lines.

Power is never abstract: it is carried by people, rules, debts and the stories survivors choose to preserve. The novel places a formidable woman inside the human machinery of command and asks what it costs to survive, lead and retain authorship of one’s own history.