Xu Suqing looked at that familiar face — caked with dried blood, yet appearing somehow alive, eyes open, staring back at him, asking questions without words.

Why did it take you so long to come?

Do you know, now, that you were wrong?

Even if you’ve only just come, even if you know you were wrong — do you know what your brothers wanted?

In the next life — can we meet again?

He walked toward the head, one step at a time. The Black Wu soldiers were already rushing him with a chorus of shouts, curved blades drawn and slashing down.

Moments later, a dozen bodies lay on the ground. For all their ferocity, they were no match for Xu Suqing. Cutting them down was, for him, something close to child’s play — so trivially easy that it barely merited the name.

He had not once looked at any of them. His eyes had never left the head of Xiao Ting from the moment he saw it.

That day at the Blood Floating Bandit settlement, Xiao Ting had gone with the Black Wu. And Xu Suqing had thought: don’t be afraid, brother. I’ll bring you back.

Now, looking at that head, he felt as if someone had driven a blade into his chest. Not once — over and over, stroke after stroke.

He lifted the head off the pole and held it against his chest, holding it tightly.

He did not leave. He wanted to find the rest of his brother — see if a body remained somewhere. The only thing left to do seemed to be putting them together.

He scanned the ground outside the tent. Two rows of fire-basins stood burning. Xu Suqing drew one of the Black Wu soldiers’ curved blades and knocked each basin over in turn, scattering embers across the sides of the great tent. The wind caught them, and fire rose quickly.

In the tree line at the edge of camp, the Blood Floating Bandit riders saw the fire and charged out immediately.

Gao Wukan, one of the Holy Generals, spurred toward the flames. He cut through a number of Black Wu soldiers on the way and arrived to find his General holding a severed head, searching wildly through the area around him.

He couldn’t yet make out whose head it was, but he could guess.

And in that moment, Gao Wukan felt as if a blade had been driven into his own chest too.

“Kill — go kill!” Xu Suqing looked up, saw Gao Wukan arrive, and screamed at him.

Gao Wukan wheeled his horse and charged back out — into the Black Wu troops converging from every direction. No hesitation, not a flicker of it.

The Black Wu garrison had not been large, but it was not nothing either, and it had split into two watch shifts. Their main defensive focus was the southern perimeter — after all, the north was where Black Wu territory lay, the direction they had come from.

When fire rose at the central tent, the scattered garrison converged toward it from all sides.

Even a reduced garrison outnumbered the Blood Floating Bandit riders by a considerable margin.

Gao Wukan charged into them, fought until he was drenched in blood from head to foot, blood running down his clothes and dripping off.

He circled back to find Xu Suqing still searching the ground for any trace of Xiao Ting’s body.

But they didn’t know when Xiao Ting had been killed. The cold weather had preserved the head from decay. The body might have been disposed of long since — and given Black Wu custom, it was not impossible that it had been hacked apart and fed to their mastiffs.

“We have to go.” Gao Wukan grabbed Xu Suqing by the arm. “The Black Wu are closing in from all sides. We can’t hold.”

Xu Suqing looked up at him. His eyes were red — red enough to drip blood.

“Burn it. Burn all of it!”

Xu Suqing was screaming now, and he looked like a wounded tiger come down from the mountain — the wound making him more savage, not less.

“Chief, we have to go. The Black Wu garrison isn’t small. We can’t beat them.”

Gao Wukan pressed again.

“Then we die!” Xu Suqing grabbed Gao Wukan’s collar with one hand. “Everyone dies!”

Gao Wukan froze. He stared at the man in front of him — unable to understand what the General meant.

“Everyone is going to die anyway…” Xu Suqing screamed like a wild animal. “Do you know why I never explained myself to you? Because everyone has to die! You, me, everyone! I didn’t tell you — because I wanted you all dead!”

Gao Wukan’s eyes widened, and kept widening. The incomprehension in them deepened, layered now with something like horror, and something like not recognizing the person in front of him.

Was this their General? The brother they had lived and fought alongside for over a decade? The man they had once risked everything to pull out of the authorities’ hands — this was Xu Suqing?

“Why!” Gao Wukan could not help it. He screamed the word back, eyes going bloodshot. “WHY!”

“Because we all deserve it!” Xu Suqing howled back. “Every time I’ve killed someone in these ten years, I’ve felt I deserved to die. Every time I’ve watched you kill, I’ve felt you deserved to die too.”

“But I couldn’t bear to. And I was afraid. Ten years of that. Do you think I was happy? Do you honestly believe I was happy simply because I was still breathing?”

Xu Suqing wrenched at Gao Wukan’s collar, dragging him forward. Gao Wukan stumbled.

Xu Suqing’s voice was raw and scraped bare. “We’re all people who should have died. Ten years ago, maybe not. But once we came to this northern wastes — we all should have died.”

“If the Black Wu hadn’t come, I might have gone on like that. Living meanly. Living in that agony.”

“But the Black Wu came. And so the lives of Blood Floating Bandit — everyone’s lives — were meant to end here.”

Gao Wukan raised his hand and seized the front of Xu Suqing’s robe in his own fist, staring straight back into his eyes.

“Fine then! Let’s die!” he shouted.

“Die — do I look afraid of dying? What I can’t bear—” He stopped, then went on: “Chief. If you had said it straight to the brothers — would any of them have been afraid to die?”

Xu Suqing said, “You wouldn’t have feared it. You would all have been willing to die at my side. That’s not enough.”

He let go of Gao Wukan’s collar and pointed at the riders around them. “Every last one of those men has to die. I say it and you’ll follow me — but them? Will they?”

Gao Wukan stood mute for a moment. Something inside him was about to explode outward, fill the space, and blow both of them apart.

Then he roared: “So you went and provoked the Ning army?! Went and killed several thousand of their border soldiers?!”

“And what of it?!” Xu Suqing shouted back. “The central plains owes me!”

Gao Wukan went still again.

“I was already going to die — do I still have to care about that?” Xu Suqing screamed. “The more who die, the happier I am!”

Gao Wukan tore the head of Xiao Ting from Xu Suqing’s grip with both hands and thrust it up before Xu Suqing’s eyes.

“Look — look at him carefully! Are you happy?!”

He was roaring, raging, like another wounded beast.

Xu Suqing let out a howl and drove a kick into Gao Wukan, sending him sprawling. Gao Wukan lost his grip. The head rolled free.

Both men scrambled after it at the same time, tumbling over each other, four hands catching it together.

Then both of them went silent.

“Chief…” Gao Wukan’s voice broke. He was looking into Xu Suqing’s eyes when he spoke. “The man we went to save, back then — he was Xu Suqing of the Three Yi Prefectures. The man who commanded the admiration of everyone in the northern wastes jianghu.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Then the tears came, and he could not stop them.

“I…”

Xu Suqing sank to the ground. A moment later he was weeping too — unrestrained, heaving sobs.

“This northern wastes is hell…”

As the tears fell, they cut two pale channels through the grime and windburn on a face weathered beyond its years.

The Xu Suqing here and now bore no resemblance to the young man who had once traveled the three prefectures visiting masters, whose manner had been so refined it brought men to their knees and women to their hearts — the one name everyone in the northern wastes jianghu placed first, without argument, regardless of whether they were man or woman.

What sat here now looked like a walking corpse that had learned to cry.

“Chief…” Gao Wukan turned and looked at the riders behind them — burning things, fighting Black Wu soldiers, rifling through the pockets of Black Wu dead.

“They were never human. They were the demons of our own hearts — the ones you and I let out. That’s how Blood Floating Bandit came to be.”

He watched the silhouettes in the firelight, and for the first time in his life he felt fear — not of those shapes, but of his own heart.

So this is what a heart’s demon looks like.

“We let them out. So we end them ourselves.”

Xu Suqing picked up the head of Xiao Ting, tore a strip from the hem of his robe, wrapped it carefully, and tied it across his back.

“Brothers!” He raised his voice toward the riders. “The Black Wu are few here — kill them all, and everything in this camp is ours!”

Gao Wukan led over a horse and handed Xu Suqing the reins.

Xu Suqing swung into the saddle, drew his blade. Gao Wukan caught another horse and mounted, looking over at him.

“Chief — this should be the last time we kill anyone. So shall we make it count?”

“Let’s make it count.”

Xu Suqing answered, then drove his horse forward. The riders, as they always had, followed him and Gao Wukan into the charge — until they saw, from all sides, the Black Wu encirclement closing in.

In that moment, the riders were afraid. The way they had been afraid when the Black Wu army stood outside the gates of the Blood Floating Bandit settlement: faced with those masses of ferocious soldiers, they were afraid.

“The demons are afraid!” Xu Suqing spurred on, blade raised. “The true self is not!”

Gao Wukan was right behind him. “Kill!”

—

Past noon.

On the open plain, two horses ran themselves to exhaustion and collapsed. Their riders toppled to the earth.

Gao Wukan crawled toward Xu Suqing with the last of his strength. Xu Suqing shook his head — he was all right.

The two of them lay in the grass. Wind swept low across the ground, carrying dust, passing over their bodies, passing over their faces.

“Blood Floating Bandit is gone,” Xu Suqing said to no one.

Gao Wukan said, “Not quite. We’re still breathing. As long as we are — Blood Floating Bandit still exists. We need to die.”

“Yes. We need to die.”

Xu Suqing struggled up to sit, looked north. Faint in the distance, thick black smoke still rolled against the sky.

A Black Wu camp — burned by a band of outlaws. The damage to the Black Wu’s provisions and supplies had been considerable.

Of the three thousand and more Blood Floating Bandit riders, only Xu Suqing and Gao Wukan had come out of that place alive.

“Chief…”

“Don’t call me Chief anymore. Call me Big Brother Xu, the way you used to. It’s been years.”

“Big Brother Xu… Let’s rest a bit, then keep going to kill more.”

“Keep going to kill more.”

Xu Suqing lay back again. Above him, a flock of birds wheeled across the sky in formation, flying south.

“Can souls find their way home?”

“Probably not. It’s been too long away.”

“Shall we try?”

“Let’s try.”

—