The carriage simply stood there, blocking the road — as though it had been waiting for Yuanzhen for a very long time.

This was an obscure little border pass, nothing like Beishan Pass, which everyone under heaven knew by name.

Along the northern frontier, there were dozens of passes, large and small. This one was without question the least conspicuous among them.

In a given year, the total number of people passing through in both directions might not match what Beishan Pass saw in ten days.

Because past this gate, the road stretched on for a very long and extremely difficult mountain path. The mountains harboured not only tigers, leopards, wolves, and jackals, but mountain bandits and local despots as well.

Fugitives with prices on their heads, mountain folk with nowhere else to turn, nomadic tribes too small to matter — all of them had settled into the area around this pass, forming a region of lawlessness and violence.

And even if you survived the mountains and emerged the other side, the vast Northern Plain was right there. Even the bandits and local strongmen didn’t dare venture out onto it.

Because on the Northern Plain there were two kinds of people before whom all others trembled. One was the mounted raiders who preyed on passing merchants and travellers — and the bandits who ruled the mountain passages, the moment they stepped onto the plain, became lambs before those riders. The other kind was the Heiwu cavalry, who hunted even the raiders. The Northern Plain technically did not belong to Heiwu according to any map — but in the latter years of the Chu dynasty, the Central Plains had lost the strength to hold it, and so the plain had become the Heiwu cavalry’s hunting ground.

At least through Beishan Pass, there were still herders, trading caravans, and Central Plains merchants coming and going. The people who passed through this gate were those who did not fear death.

Yuanzhen stared at that small pass interior and the single black carriage blocking the way. He set his jaw and spurred the horse.

His horse was nothing — a common draught horse. The way it ran was hardly graceful or powerful.

But right now, this horse was everything that stood between him and death.

The carriage door was open, but a curtain still hung across it, so there was no seeing who sat inside.

As Yuanzhen drove hard toward the carriage, the curtain stirred. A hand extended from behind it. A finger flicked.

Yuanzhen’s eyes went wide in an instant. He threw himself from the saddle.

A stone shot through the air with terrible accuracy and tremendous force. It struck the draught horse square in the forehead with a heavy crack.

The horse let out a wretched cry and crashed to the ground. For a single moment its four legs went rigid — and in the next breath they were thrashing wildly.

Yuanzhen landed and swept the weapon from his back.

Such as it was. It was a scale rod — taken from the medicine shop back in Pingyuan County. The scale there had been small; medicine was weighed in tiny amounts. But the rod itself was metal-forged, a foot and a half long. Yuanzhen had ground one end to a point. It looked like an exceptionally long chopstick — or perhaps somewhat like the Tingwei Bureau’s iron probes.

The curtain was swept aside.

Yuanzhen’s eyes narrowed at once.

Because he recognised the person sitting in that carriage. It was the Tingwei Bureau Qianban he had wounded — that young-looking Qianban.

Ye Xiaoqian’s left forearm bone was broken, the arm still wrapped in bandages. Both his legs, though the bones hadn’t snapped, had fractures in them.

So he could only sit there, opposing his enemy with one right hand — a hand that had two broken finger bones of its own.

Yet Yuanzhen could see it clearly: that young man’s face held a kind of serenity.

Yuanzhen did not move immediately. He looked carefully over everything, and found that this young Qianban had only two things at hand.

One was an unsheathed changdao. A standard Central Plains-style横刀 — but this one seemed slightly different. The hilt was wrapped in red thread, and woven through the red were threads of black.

The red and black together were striking. But Yuanzhen’s instincts told him that such a combination might not be merely decorative.

Beside that, to the young Qianban’s right, lay a small pile of stones.

Ordinary stones — yet somehow, every single one in that pile seemed to have been chosen with care. In size and shape alike, each appeared to be exactly as he would have wished.

“You can’t walk?” Yuanzhen asked.

Ye Xiaoqian smiled. It was a bright smile, clear and open — like the sunlight of this particular day, like his age itself: everything still as brilliant and full of life as it should be.

The way he sat wasn’t especially dignified either — legs splayed out, because his injuries wouldn’t allow him to sit cross-legged.

But he didn’t mind. In fact, he had decided this was better than sitting cross-legged. With the weather as it was — even up here in the northern frontier — sitting cross-legged for too long made the backside sweat. Too much sweat became uncomfortable.

Like this, there was good airflow. He found it quite pleasant.

So when he heard Yuanzhen ask whether he could walk, he genuinely felt that not being able to walk was, in this moment, a rather comfortable state of affairs.

“Yes,” Ye Xiaoqian answered. Then he asked Yuanzhen something in return.

“When you look at me with one eye — does it seem like I’m sitting at a slight angle?”

Yuanzhen actually tilted his head and studied him. Then he replied, “It does seem a bit off.”

Ye Xiaoqian said, “Then when you come at me in a moment, make sure you look carefully. If your aim is off on account of your eye and you miss, you might end up being killed by a man who can’t walk.”

Yuanzhen said, “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Then he moved.

He pushed off from the ground, his body blazing forward like a streak of afterimages, driving toward the carriage. Not in a straight line — he kept shifting direction, accelerating to the very limit of what he could do. He had never moved this fast in all the years of his life.

The brief exchange before he struck had not been idle chat. He was calculating — time, distance. How long to reach the carriage, and in that time, how many stones could that young Qianban throw?

He concluded: two throws at most. With two broken finger bones, the most he could release in a single throw was two stones. If those stones had been even slightly larger, it would have been one stone per throw.

In Yuanzhen’s eyes, every preparation his enemy had made was a vulnerability laid bare.

He didn’t wait for Ye Xiaoqian to throw first and then dodge. Instead, he used his first direction change as bait — to draw out the throw.

Sure enough: the instant Yuanzhen changed direction, two stones left Ye Xiaoqian’s hand, sealing off the path ahead.

And in that same sliver of a moment, Yuanzhen hit the ground in a roll. The stones ripped through the air just above his body.

He used the momentum of the roll to spring upward. In mid-air, he snapped his wrist — two stones of his own flew straight at Ye Xiaoqian.

Two more left Ye Xiaoqian’s hand at the same moment. All four stones collided in mid-air with perfect precision.

To the eyes of a martial expert, what the world revealed was sharper and more detailed than what an ordinary person could see.

Sight was the foundation of reaction.

The four stones burst apart. Yuanzhen knew his moment had come. He touched down and drove forward, the scale rod thrusting for Ye Xiaoqian’s throat.

And in that instant, he felt a searing pain explode in his chest — as though something had drilled through him.

The pain scattered his focus, his gathered force. His speed dropped. Sweat broke across his forehead in an instant.

He looked down. There was a white mark on his chest. A stone strike.

That man had thrown three.

Ye Xiaoqian was still smiling. “Did you teach yourself to throw stones like that?”

Yuanzhen didn’t answer him. He was adjusting his breathing. That last strike — if his body hadn’t already been moving at top speed when it hit, if he hadn’t been mid-leap, the stone would have taken him in the throat instead of the chest.

That young Qianban who couldn’t walk had not lacked the opportunity to kill him in that moment. Only the calculation had been slightly off.

Seeing Yuanzhen stay silent, Ye Xiaoqian’s bright smile remained — and now there was a gleam of satisfaction in it as well.

“I didn’t teach myself… even something like throwing stones, I had the best teacher in the world.”

As he said it, Ye Xiaoqian’s gaze went sharp.

“So why did you think you could escape from me a second time?”

He pressed two stones between his fingers and looked at Yuanzhen. “If I let you escape again — what kind of face would I have to show all those teachers who worked so hard to teach me?”

He flicked his wrist. Two stones flew out — one behind the other, so that looking straight on, only one was visible.

Yuanzhen drew a deep breath. The scale rod thrust forward to meet them.

This was swordsmanship.

A sharp crack: the rod struck the first stone dead-on. The stone shattered.

In the next instant, the second stone hit the rod as well — but by then the forward force of the thrust was spent.

The second impact knocked the rod sideways.

And in that precise moment, Yuanzhen saw the young Qianban suddenly leap to his feet and seize that changdao.

Yuanzhen was startled. He had not expected the man to be able to rise with both legs injured.

Which meant he had to be faster. He had to kill the Qianban before he could fully stand.

Yuanzhen let out a roar, exploded off the ground, and charged forward in great strides.

When the distance was down to less than three chi, a gleam of light entered Yuanzhen’s eyes.

Because he could see that the Qianban was rising, yes — but his injuries had cost him. He was slow.

Before the Qianban could fully stand, the scale rod could be driven through his heart.

A heavy thud.

Yuanzhen’s foot found nothing beneath it. There was a pit.

A pit. An actual pit.

In that moment, even as he was falling, Yuanzhen’s mind still had the presence to process what had happened. This Qianban was a petty schemer. A man of utterly shameless cunning.

He couldn’t stand up at all. He had never been able to. The whole thing — rising to his feet, grabbing the blade — had been a feint. Designed to draw Yuanzhen forward.

Yuanzhen, who prided himself on reading men’s hearts, had been read by someone at least twenty years his junior.

And with the most shallow, the most inelegant, the most artless of tricks.

His mind understood it. His body could not respond in time. His foot found nothing and he fell.

He flung both arms wide as he dropped, and his reflexes were good enough that he almost caught the rim. Almost.

But the pit was very wide. His arms, spread to their full span, didn’t find an edge.

He fell in. And he fell for a while.

The pit was deep as well.

When he hit the bottom he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his feet. He looked down. A layer of iron caltrops covered the ground.

“You have no shame!”

Yuanzhen threw his head back and shouted upward.

“Don’t be hasty — I can’t walk, so it’ll take me a moment to get over there. Wait just a little while before you start cursing at me.”

The voice drifted down from above.

After some time, he finally saw two people helping that young Qianban shuffle to the edge of the pit.

In the time it had taken, Yuanzhen had not been idle — he had considered every possible way out. And he had found that this little schemer was, in truth, a very thorough schemer.

Medicinal powder had been scattered throughout the pit. He could already feel his strength slowly leaving him.

Ye Xiaoqian leaned over the edge and peered down. The corners of his mouth curved up into that same bright, unhesitating smile.

“Big enough?” Ye Xiaoqian asked.

Yuanzhen: “You — how in the hell did you know I’d come through here? How in the hell were you certain enough to dig a pit here and wait?”

Ye Xiaoqian was silent for a moment. Then, with a tone that was almost apologetic, he said: “Well… if I were to tell you that I came here to wait for you entirely on a wild guess, and that I dug this pit only as a precaution — just in case — would that make you angry?”

Yuanzhen had no time left to be angry.

He raised his hand to end things with the scale rod, but the moment his arm went up, a stone struck him — shattering two of his finger bones.

The rod dropped. Yuanzhen crumpled to the ground, landing squarely on the iron caltrops.

Ye Xiaoqian laughed pleasantly. “I have many teachers who taught me many kinds of skills. The skill I used today — throwing stones — my teacher is the finest in the world…”

He waved a hand. A net dropped down, settling over Yuanzhen.

Ye Xiaoqian glanced at the two people propping him up on either side. He lowered his voice.

“That part just now — where I said it was all a wild guess — don’t let that get out. If it gets out, the official version is that I planned everything with brilliant foresight and executed it with flawless strategy. Are we clear?”

—