Shici was still some distance away when he saw Zhong Dashu collapse for no apparent reason he could make out. Zhong Dashu’s enormous frame had blocked his view, so he had not seen Tang Pidi move — only a flicker of shadow, and Zhong Dashu was on his knees.

When Shici ran to Zhong Dashu’s side, Zhong Dashu looked back at him with eyes full of fear and bewilderment — that was the last expression he would wear in this world. He did not understand why this was happening to him.

Blood burst between his fingers. A wound like that was impossible to staunch, and it had severed the artery.

It was not long before Zhong Dashu’s color went from livid to ashen and he pitched face-forward onto the ground, the great body falling like a mountain coming down.

Shici’s face had gone very ugly. He knew exactly how formidable Zhong Dashu was. The Xu family’s traders had discovered this dangerous creature out on the steppe and paid a great price to buy him out of his tribe and bring him back to Dachu.

In the years since, Zhong Dashu had done a great many things for the Xu family, and he had never once met his match.

A normal man could not withstand even a single palm strike from him.

Shici watched Zhong Dashu go down, and he thought he could almost hear the roar raging inside Zhong Dashu — the unwillingness, and perhaps not even comprehending how he could have died like this.

He hadn’t even managed to see how it was done.

Shici looked up and scanned the area. He couldn’t seem to find the one called Li Chi. It had been Zhong Dashu who struck first at Li Chi, yet now Li Chi was nowhere in sight.

Li Chi was above his head.

Before Tang Pidi struck Zhong Dashu down, Tang Pidi had told Li Chi to go for Shici — cut off the head and the body dies, an inviolable principle. But Li Chi hadn’t charged straight at him, because he had the feeling things were not as straightforward as they seemed. Someone who had planned all this would not have laid out everything visible on the surface as the entirety of what he had prepared.

If a person lets their enemy see everything they’ve arranged — and that visible everything is the entirety of the arrangement — then that person’s capabilities are limited. They are not a true threat.

Li Chi sensed that somewhere he could not see, a danger he had not anticipated was waiting, and that the moment he stepped out in front of Shici, that unseen danger would appear at his back.

So at the first opportunity he slipped out of the enemy’s sight. Using Zhong Dashu as cover, he got to the edge of the road and climbed swiftly up the nearest large tree.

This tree had a peculiar history. Before the convoy arrived, Yao Busheng had climbed it to wait and deliver a killing blow to Li Chi. And before Yao Busheng had climbed it, Yu Jiuling was already there.

Yu Jiuling had deliberately goaded Yao Busheng and led him away because he knew both where his own advantage lay and where his weakness was.

His advantage was speed. His weakness was that he could not fight.

It was not that Yu Jiuling hadn’t considered ambushing the man himself, but he was not certain he could kill him. And if the man turned the tables and killed him instead, who would remove the danger from Li Chi’s path? Who would leave a signal for Li Chi?

So Yu Jiuling had made the most correct choice. Making correct judgments was also Yu Jiuling’s advantage.

And leading the man away wasn’t only about uncertainty over whether he was a match for him — it was also because he had left something in this tree for Li Chi.

Li Chi climbed to the spot where Yu Jiuling had hidden, reached upward, and closed his hand around the iron-backed bow Yu Jiuling had left there.

This bow was one of three gifts Yu Chaozong had brought for Li Chi on this trip to Jizhou. The bow was iron-backed and drew at full four-stone weight — a pull most men could not even manage.

The second gift was a serpent-scale armor — thin-looking and light-seeming, yet extraordinarily resilient. An ordinary sword swung with full force could not cut through it. Its finest quality was precisely that thinness: it did not impede movement in the slightest, and its tight-laid scales would stop an arrow as well. A true marvel for self-protection.

The third was a saber.

This saber had cost Yu Chaozong enormous effort and considerable gold to track down. He had originally intended to keep it for himself, but in order to persuade Li Chi to come up the mountain, he had decided before setting out to make it his gift.

In this world there are three Imperial Swords — called the sovereign treasures of blades in the realm. Those who don’t know the truth assume the Three Imperial Swords is the name of a single weapon; in fact they are three royal swords belonging to the Dachu imperial house.

In this world there are also Seven Named Sabers. Ranked seventh is called Shenshou — “Divine Head” — and is held in the Gold Saber Sect of Jizhou. No one outside the sect master knows where it is kept, and even the sect master would not lightly bring it out.

The name Shenshou comes from an old legend: the one who wields it can slay gods.

Ranked sixth is called Hongxiu — “Red Sleeve.” Its whereabouts have long since been lost; it has not been seen in the jianghu in several decades.

Ranked fifth is called Shanque — “Mountain Breach” — now housed in the Mingqi Pavilion of the Dachu imperial palace.

Ranked fourth is called Piye — “Cleave the Wilds.”

Ranked third is called Chulan — “Orchid Emergence” — the only curved blade among the seven. Forged from meteorite iron, said to come from the southern minorities. It too now resides in the Mingqi Pavilion of the Dachu palace — the southern tribal ruler surrendered it to save his own life when Dachu’s armies swept through the south in an earlier era.

Ranked second is called Juyu — “Great Fish.” By legend, no ordinary person can wield it; it is piercingly cold, and common folk who carry it fall ill before long. What material it was made from is unknown. The jianghu calls it an ancient divine weapon.

Ranked first is called Jingzhe — “Awakening of Insects.” Why it holds first place, no one has ever been able to explain with certainty. The jianghu has always said so. One scholar pursued the truth and found only one plausible explanation: Jingzhe was once the personal saber of Master Zhou.

Master Zhou’s saber never left its scabbard for the whole of his life. Perhaps when the rankings were first drawn up, whoever made them considered that a blade belonging to a man of benevolence and righteousness — a true gentleman’s blade — deserved the foremost place. Jingzhe is also called the Gentleman’s Blade, and it too is held in the Mingqi Pavilion.

What Yu Chaozong brought Li Chi was the seventh-ranked Shenshou — held in the Gold Saber Sect. With the sect fallen on hard times and unable to recover, the sect master had concluded they must use this blade to secure a future for their disciples. When Yu Chaozong heard of this, he sent men to the Gold Saber Sect and purchased Shenshou at great cost.

The price was not money alone. He also arranged positions for many of the sect’s remaining disciples — this was one of the conditions the sect master had set.

The Gold Saber Sect’s decline was a dispiriting story. The sect had once scaled great heights — undisputed as the foremost name in Jizhou’s jianghu, with hundreds of disciples marching to the northern frontier to resist the Black Wu invaders, pushing the sect’s renown to its absolute peak.

But after that, the sect walked a strange path and fell into a strange trap. Its disciples came to regard service to the authorities as the greatest honor, and many of those who entered the Gold Saber Sect came not to study the martial arts but to find a road into the Surveillance Bureau.

Now the saber Shenshou rested against Li Chi’s back.

Li Chi pulled down the iron-backed bow. The reason he had not carried it on his person — despite it being a bow of that size and power — was because he understood the bow’s role: to strike by surprise.

Carrying it openly, a weapon that large and that distinctive, would put any opponent on guard.

In an army, archers form ranks to meet the enemy and rely not on surprise but on massed and concentrated damage. But in a small-scale engagement like this one, a skilled bowman hidden in an unexpected position — the advantage he could bring to his side was not hard to imagine.

When Li Chi loosed his first arrow, the wind it dragged behind it made every leaf in front of him thrash and shudder violently.

He had not aimed that first arrow at Shici — he needed to keep that one alive.

The shaft, trailing a splitting rush of air, flew out from behind the leaves and punched through the skull of a man who had been creeping up to ambush Tang Pidi. The iron-backed bow’s force was immense — it went straight through the head. And the arrows Li Chi used were no ordinary shafts either: they were iron-feathered arrows, fitted with iron vanes at the tail like three rows of small blades. What that could do to a wound on its way through left little to the imagination.

Even Li Chi was startled by the violence of that shot. He had only known the bow felt right in his hands — he had not expected power like this.

This bow’s effective range was more than double the standard-issue bow of Dachu’s infantry.

Just then, something moved toward Li Chi.

A piece of tree bark — or so it appeared, and so convincingly that if you were not looking carefully you would not have noticed it moving.

Before Li Chi had climbed this tree, Gongshu Yingying had slipped out of the carriage. She had made the same choice as Li Chi: rather than plunge into the melee, she reached into the carriage and pulled out a piece of fabric, then slipped into the forest.

She was looking for an opportunity. But when she came to look for Li Chi, Li Chi had already vanished.

She unfolded the cloth and held it before her. Its construction was unusual: from a distance it was nearly indistinguishable from the texture of tree bark. Standing still behind it, she would not be seen.

But she had found Li Chi. After he loosed that first arrow, the crack and rush of the shaft was too loud, the force too savage — even the leaves had shaken.

And so Gongshu Yingying had moved toward Li Chi, choosing to climb the other side of this same tree, her entire body shielded behind the cloth.

The sound of Li Chi drawing the bow had covered the sound of her climbing, allowing her to approach — and her movements up the tree had been extraordinarily quiet.

She did not seem like a person at all. Even when she was about to kill, she suppressed herself completely — no fluctuation of mood, no variation in breath.

Behind Li Chi, Gongshu Yingying slowly opened the cloth. The man before her was drawing back the bow, about to loose a second arrow.

And so Gongshu Yingying struck. This was the best moment.

From her sleeve slid an iron spike — just over a foot long, called a water-splitting spike, a weapon better suited to fighting in water. She drove it down toward the space between Li Chi’s shoulder blades with full force.

Not far away, Tang Pidi moved back and forth through the enemy like a man walking through open ground. No one before him could stand for more than a single exchange.

His method was simple to the point of strangeness — he only stabbed. And only at the throat.

The black iron spike drove in and withdrew from a throat in an instant, and he never looked back. Through the mist of blood, Tang Pidi moved on — not like a ghost, because there was nothing hidden about him. He was out in the open, striking exactly where he said he would, and not concealing it by a hair.

A blade came slashing down straight for the top of Tang Pidi’s head. His opponent had already raised the saber high when Tang Pidi’s spike started moving, but the blade had only begun to fall when the spike had already punched through the carotid artery.

Nearby, a man of middling height but considerably powerful build caught sight of Tang Pidi. His saber had nine iron rings along its spine, and when the blade moved the rings rang out in a metallic chorus. He spotted Tang Pidi, and Tang Pidi spotted him.

This was Shi Su — formerly the third elder of the Storm Gate. He let out a tiger’s roar and came charging at Tang Pidi.

At that same moment, Tang Pidi caught sight of a dark shape falling from a tree. He froze — because what he saw falling was Li Chi.

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