The great Achilles tendon of the right foot severed, and the massively built Liao Tinglou immediately faltered. He lurched backward, unable to bear weight on his right foot — barely keeping upright on the left.

But at this point, would Yu Hongyi give him any chance to recover?

The men of the Magistrate’s Court were vicious by nature — it was simply how they operated.

If the enemy had no opening, find one. Once found, press it without mercy.

In a fair contest between two jianghu fighters, a man who kept attacking an opponent’s wound after it was inflicted would be seen as winning without honor.

But the Magistrate’s Court was not in the business of fair contests. Their enemies were the worst criminals in the world — there was no room to think about honor.

The enemy had a wound? Then hit the wound, and hit it hard.

Liao Tinglou had lost the advantage of his size and strength. Yu Hongyi had found his opening.

He rolled behind him in an instant, drew the bamboo slat again, and sliced — cutting the tendon at the back of the left heel as well.

Liao Tinglou could no longer hold himself up. That massive frame crashed to the ground with a sound like a mountain falling.

But this was a man of ferocious will — even reduced to this, he would not simply yield.

He anticipated Yu Hongyi’s follow-up attack. The instant he hit the ground, his arm swept back in a wide horizontal arc.

That kind of anticipation, that kind of tactical thinking — Yu Hongyi found himself suddenly suspicious. Was this man really born a bandit?

Looking back at the entire exchange, this bandit chief’s mastery of the iron-body technique had taken twenty or thirty years of grueling practice to achieve. Who dedicates a lifetime to such training only to become a horse thief?

As the common people say: poor men become scholars, wealthy men become warriors. A family without means couldn’t possibly fund a child’s martial training from youth.

Yu Hongyi dodged the sweeping arm, then stepped in hard — planting a foot against Liao Tinglou’s back and seizing the arm as it swung past, using its own momentum and adding his own force.

A crack. The arm snapped.

In the next instant Yu Hongyi kicked Liao Tinglou’s helm upward — sending it spinning off his head.

Then he surged forward, and his knee hammered into Liao Tinglou’s temple.

That lion-like warrior’s head swayed — and his eyes rolled back.

He listed sideways and collapsed.

Yu Hongyi was gasping for breath, but he knew this was not the moment to lower his guard.

The Magistrate’s Court had one more iron rule: after downing an enemy, always deliver a follow-up strike to the head.

Yu Hongyi didn’t want to kill Liao Tinglou outright — a bandit chief of this caliber would know many secrets. But that was no reason to skip the protocol. He drove another blow into Liao Tinglou’s temple. Dead would be dead; alive was better.

The blow landed. Liao Tinglou lay motionless.

Only then did Yu Hongyi sink to the ground himself, breathing in great heaves. He knew, privately, that winning against this man had been sheer luck.

After a brief rest, he pushed himself up, retrieved the chain that had fallen nearby, and bound Liao Tinglou as tightly as it would go.

He still wasn’t satisfied. A man of this strength might snap the chain the moment he regained consciousness.

He tore strips from Liao Tinglou’s own robes, twisted them into rope, and added several more loops.

Still not satisfied. He stripped off his own outer robe, twisted that too, and added more.

Even then Yu Hongyi wasn’t fully at ease — if he’d had anything else at hand, he’d have added three more loops.

Once Liao Tinglou was secured and dragged aside, Yu Hongyi drew a deep breath and ran back toward the village.

His brothers were still fighting over two hundred armed bandits — he couldn’t rest easy.

He’d only made it halfway when he spotted Magistrate’s Court men running out from the village toward him — they’d come looking for him.

Seeing his own people, the coiled tension in Yu Hongyi finally released. He dropped where he stood, flat on his back, gulping air.

It was fortunate that the reinforcements Lord Ye had dispatched arrived when they did. Without them, even with the extraordinary individual skill of those dozen Magistrate’s Court men, most of them would not have made it out.

Yu Hongyi’s plan had always been to fight in the village. The enemy were cavalry — in the close quarters of a village, cavalry’s advantages meant nothing. And every Magistrate’s Court man he’d brought was hand-selected, battle-hardened to the bone.

They used the terrain — the crumbling ruins and broken walls — to draw the enemy into scattered engagements, then struck from the shadows.

Lord Ye needed to hold the frontier himself and couldn’t come in person, but he’d sent several Senior Commissioners with several hundred Black Cavalry.

Senior Commissioner Shang Qingzhu walked over and crouched beside Yu Hongyi, extending a hand to help him up.

“Let me lie here a moment…” Yu Hongyi weakly raised a finger and pointed behind him. “There’s a big one in the grove. Go tie him up some more — quickly.”

When Shang Qingzhu got to the grove and saw the man, she was momentarily speechless.

He really was enormous. But he was also bound so comprehensively that there was hardly any space left to add more wraps.

If Yu Hongyi had tied the man like this and was *still* not satisfied, Shang Qingzhu could only imagine how terrifying this person truly was.

—

The next day. The frontier fortress.

When Liao Tinglou came around, his head was splitting. He instinctively tried to sit up — and felt chains clanking all around him at the first movement.

He blinked through the fog, looked down at himself, and gradually understood: he was chained to a large flat stone — not a proper bed, just the most level rock the Magistrate’s Court people had been able to find — with great heavy chains locking him in place.

He shook his head, feeling something rattling loosely inside his skull.

This wasn’t actually his first time waking. He’d surfaced once during the night, only to sink back into unconsciousness almost immediately — his eyes wouldn’t open and his head had been too heavy to lift.

The Magistrate’s Court had given him medicine. The dosage they’d administered would have kept a bull down — yet here he was, awake.

“Wake him up properly.”

He heard a voice, and then a basin of cold water hit him full in the face.

It worked — the icy shock cut through the fog considerably.

“Your name is Liao Tinglou?”

The man sitting across from him asked the question.

They’d already questioned several captured bandits before this, so knowing Liao Tinglou’s name had presented no difficulty.

Liao Tinglou shook the water from his face as best he could and got a proper look at the speaker.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Ye Zhangzhu.”

The man in white robes sat with the composed, unhurried air of a scholar.

“Ye Zhangzhu?”

Something stirred in Liao Tinglou’s mind, though his thoughts were still sluggish. His expression was one of confused half-recognition.

Then — it clicked. His eyes widened slightly.

“*Jizhou’s* Ye Zhangzhu?”

Lord Ye inclined his head. “The same.”

Something shifted in Liao Tinglou’s expression. The hard ferocity from moments before was gone, replaced by something far more complicated.

“Do you know me?” Lord Ye asked.

Liao Tinglou first shook his head, then nodded. “In a manner of speaking. I remember seeing you — though you won’t remember seeing me.”

Lord Ye’s brow furrowed. “I’ve seen you before?”

“Roughly fifteen years ago, when Lord Ye traveled to Yanzhou — do you remember?”

Lord Ye nodded slowly. “I remember.”

He hadn’t gone to Yanzhou often. Fifteen years ago — that was when he’d gone as an envoy for Jizhou’s Military Commissioner Ceng Ling, delivering congratulatory gifts to the newly appointed Yanzhou Military Commissioner Zhou Shiren.

“On that visit to Yanzhou,” Liao Tinglou said, “Lord Ye spoke a single sentence — and saved an entire martial sect from destruction. Do you recall?”

The details had grown hazy over fifteen years. Lord Ye thought carefully.

Then it came back to him.

He had been at a banquet Zhou Shiren held in his honor. Among the other guests drinking that evening, someone from the Magistrate’s Bureau mentioned they’d uncovered evidence of a jianghu sect plotting treason.

Of the ten such claims Lord Ye had ever heard, all ten had been false. What martial sect would be delusional enough to try and stage a rebellion on its own? A sect riding someone else’s coattails — possible. A sect rising up independently — absurd.

And this particular accusation came from the Magistrate’s Bureau, whose methods were well known. If a sect paid them enough, they’d leave it alone. If a sect didn’t pay — or didn’t pay enough — any charge imaginable could be fabricated.

At the time, Lord Ye had been drinking with Zhou Shiren — not at the head table by rank, but present as Ceng Ling’s representative, which gave him a seat.

He’d happened to overhear the Bureau man mention in passing that the Bear Tiger Sect had attempted treason.

Under ordinary circumstances, a remark like that at a banquet would earn a nod from the Military Commissioner, a brief acknowledgment, and the matter would be left entirely to the Bureau.

But the name *Bear Tiger Sect* gave Lord Ye a jolt.

A few years before, when渤海 raiders struck Yanzhou and the army had repelled them, the Bear Tiger Sect had sent over three hundred of its members to fight. After the brutal engagements, three quarters of those three hundred lay dead or wounded.

The army had even cited their contribution to the court, and the court had awarded the sect a commemorative plaque, which now hung at their gate.

And now, just a few years later — these people who had bled for Yanzhou were suddenly charged with treason?

Lord Ye wanted to help, but knew his standing was limited. So instead he feigned surprise and remarked casually that he seemed to recall Military Commissioner Ceng having a distant relative among Bear Tiger Sect’s students — one who had even fought in that campaign.

He didn’t know if it would work. But he had to try.

Lord Ye understood the logic of officialdom: in matters of uncertainty, assume the worst and err on the side of caution.

The Bureau man’s expression changed immediately. He asked Lord Ye if he knew which member was the Commissioner’s relative.

Lord Ye shook his head — he’d only heard the Commissioner mention it in passing, he said, with apparent pride at the time.

The Bureau man’s face shifted again, and he changed the subject.

Before leaving Yanzhou, Lord Ye made it his business to ask around. When he heard the Bear Tiger Sect’s people had all been released, he finally relaxed.

To avoid raising suspicion, he had even paid a formal visit to the Bear Tiger Sect. When the sect leader, Elder Jin Tuoding, learned the full story, he had tried to prostrate himself in gratitude.

Lord Ye wouldn’t accept such a bow. He simply told the Bear Tiger Sect’s people that if the Bureau came asking, they should insist that someone among them was the Jizhou Commissioner’s distant kin.

That was fifteen years ago. Lord Ye had genuinely forgotten it.

Now, struck by the memory, he looked again at Liao Tinglou — and understood, at last, why the man’s iron-body mastery was so formidable.

—