The seventh leader kept his eyes on Feng Wuliu’s blade. He knew exactly how fine a saber like that was — because he had one himself.
Feng Wuliu glanced back at the straight blade that had pinned Zhang Tailai to the wall. It was nearly identical to his own.
“You have a saber like that yourself, don’t you?”
“Mine is mine. Yours is also mine.”
The seventh leader replied, then stepped forward.
He had no saber in his hand at that moment. Feng Wuliu did.
Although the realm was already deeply fractured, rebel armies rising on every side, in truth those rebel forces were not particularly well-armed. A hundred-fold-forged military saber, in particular, was equipment restricted to officers of the rank of battalion commander and above in the regular garrison troops.
The local militia units couldn’t come close to matching the weapons and armor of the regular garrison forces — the gap wasn’t a matter of one or two grades.
Getting hold of a hundred-fold-forged saber of the kind reserved for Dachu garrison officers of battalion commander rank and above was extraordinarily difficult.
“You were a garrison soldier originally, weren’t you.”
The seventh leader said as he walked forward, “I can tell from the way you hold your saber. And the hundred-fold-forged blade you’re carrying proves you were at least a battalion commander at one point. Why give up a perfectly good career to become an assassin?”
Feng Wuliu let out a cold snort. “Aren’t you the same?”
The seventh leader shook his head. “I’m different. My hundred-fold-forged saber is one I took from a battalion commander I killed last time.”
Feng Wuliu’s expression shifted — he suddenly erupted in fury.
He stepped his left foot forward half a pace, gripped the saber hilt with both hands, and brought the blade down in a swift arc. The saber’s force was like the cleaving of a mountain.
There was nothing clever or elaborate about this strike — no hidden movements, no tricks. Just this simple downward cleave, the path of the blade plain to see. Yet this single cleave was extremely difficult to evade.
The blade was fast enough, fierce enough, crashing down like thunder toward the top of the seventh leader’s skull.
Rather than retreating, the seventh leader pressed forward. In the instant the hundred-fold-forged saber fell, he used his shoulder to drive into Feng Wuliu’s arm from below, then instantly pivoted — turning from facing Feng Wuliu to facing away from him.
As he turned, Feng Wuliu’s arm shifted from one side of the seventh leader’s shoulder to the other. The movement was swift and appeared utterly fluid.
Yet it was an astonishingly bold maneuver — because in that turn, the arm holding Feng Wuliu’s saber scraped halfway around the seventh leader’s neck.
Simultaneously with the pivot, the seventh leader raised both hands to grab Feng Wuliu’s arm and wrenched it sharply downward.
His shoulder was still pressing into the arm. As he drove it down with force, a crack sounded — Feng Wuliu’s arm snapped.
The seventh leader’s hands sank, gripped Feng Wuliu’s wrist, twisted back and forth, and the saber was stripped away.
Without turning around, he shot a kick straight backward, and Feng Wuliu was sent flying off his feet.
“You shouldn’t have been this easy to defeat.”
The seventh leader examined the hundred-fold-forged saber in his hands, gave a satisfied nod, and said, “You fell to me in a single exchange because I spend every day thinking about how to kill soldiers like you — how to counter your battlefield saber techniques. I have run through it countless times already.”
He took a sudden great stride forward, body airborne, knee leading — and drove it with a crash into Feng Wuliu’s chest.
The impact caved in a large section of Feng Wuliu’s ribcage. His back slammed into a door frame, which snapped and splintered under the force.
The seventh leader drove Feng Wuliu crashing into the room and followed him inside. In the same motion, he pulled the hundred-fold-forged saber out from the wall where the dead man was still pinned.
With two soft thuds, both blades plunged down simultaneously — one through each of Feng Wuliu’s shoulders — pinning him to the floor.
The seventh leader crouched before Feng Wuliu and looked down at the face already twisted in agony.
“Who sent you?”
He asked.
Feng Wuliu was utterly helpless, yet how could he easily answer? Whether he spoke or not, death awaited him either way — what was the point?
Seeing that he had no intention of opening his mouth, the seventh leader reached behind his lower back, and after a moment produced a dagger from a leather pouch. He placed the dagger against Feng Wuliu’s ear.
“If you don’t speak, I’ll carve off your flesh. I hope you don’t doubt how great a hatred I carry for soldiers like you — cutting you into hundreds of pieces wouldn’t come close to satisfying it.”
“Why?”
Feng Wuliu struggled twice, then gave up. He didn’t answer — instead, he asked a question in return.
“My home was in a small village at the foot of Yanshan.”
The seventh leader said quietly, “The people in the village weren’t wealthy, but they lived off the mountain and managed to scrape by — until you came. Until the Jizhou army came. You may not have been part of the Jizhou army, but you came from the same stock — and you’re a deserter besides.”
The seventh leader said, “They came under the pretext of suppressing bandits and slaughtered the entire village. It wasn’t that they didn’t dare to fight the rebel armies — it was that they were too lazy to fight them. Massacre a village, collect several hundred heads, come back and claim merit without a drop of combat. Convenient, wasn’t it?”
He glanced at Feng Wuliu. “I came back from hunting in the mountains to find headless corpses everywhere in the village. I tracked them down, killed a battalion commander in the night, and took this saber…”
The seventh leader asked, “Do you still doubt whether I will hesitate to use it?”
Feng Wuliu was silent for a long time, then shook his head. “I won’t talk.”
The seventh leader sighed. “If you don’t speak now, you’ll speak later covered in blood and regret it.”
The dagger moved — followed immediately by Feng Wuliu’s agonized scream.
One cut. Two cuts. Three cuts… By the seventh cut, Feng Wuliu finally could hold out no longer.
“I’ll tell you!”
Feng Wuliu screamed.
The seventh leader leaned in slowly. Feng Wuliu gasped out a few words in a faint voice. The seventh leader acknowledged it with a murmur, then drew the dagger across Feng Wuliu’s throat.
—
Half an hour later. Yiji Hall.
The seventh leader, with two hundred-fold-forged sabers on his back, stopped outside the gate of Yiji Hall. He looked up at the enormous signboard hanging there, thought the characters on it were terribly ugly — he didn’t know it was a style of script called cursive — he simply felt they were genuinely ugly.
His first thought was: a place this large, why would they put such ugly characters on the signboard?
The seventh leader raised his hand and knocked on the door. After a moment, an impatient voice from inside called out: “Yiji Hall doesn’t receive guests at night. Move along.”
The seventh leader said nothing, continuing to rap steadily on the door. He seemed unhurried — his knocking was unhurried too.
After some unknown stretch of time, footsteps sounded from within, and someone shouted loudly from behind the door: “What do you think you’re doing? In the middle of the night, can’t sleep, coming here to cause trouble — I’ve told you already, Yiji Hall doesn’t receive guests at night!”
The seventh leader waited for the person to finish speaking, then drew one of the hundred-fold-forged sabers from behind him, and with a powerful thrust — drove it straight through the thick wooden door. Through the door and through the person speaking behind it at the same time.
The seventh leader pulled the saber back. The blade came clean — the blood wiped off inside the door panel.
He brought the hundred-fold-forged saber down in a precise downward strike into the door seam, cleanly severing the door bolt in a single blow.
The seventh leader pushed open the door and entered. He glanced at the figure on the ground still convulsing in its final spasms, then looked away.
He stepped inside, turned back, pulled the door closed behind him, picked up the fallen man’s weapon from the floor to bar the door.
Then he continued walking forward at the same pace he had used when he went to kill those five assassins — neither hurried nor slow.
That night, blood flowed like a river through Yiji Hall.
The five Class A first-tier assassins did not live in the Yiji Hall building. The Class A second-tier ones who stayed there were also few — they came during the day to wait for work, but left at night. The top echelon of these assassins either had their own residences in Jizhou City or spent their nights enjoying themselves in the pleasure quarters.
But Yiji Hall still held several hundred people — the Class B and Class C assassins were almost all present.
Two sabers. One man. He began killing from the moment he entered the gate.
The seventh leader had no intention of slaughtering every last person there by himself. He had come simply to make clear to Yiji Hall that they had wronged the wrong person.
When he had killed one hundred and seven people, he felt he was beginning to run low on strength, and so he left with his two blood-dripping sabers. From the moment he entered to the moment he left — one hundred and sixteen people total.
No one had anticipated this. The hall’s senior figures were all absent — some had gone home, some were staying at a Daoist temple — and no one still present could stop a single blow from the seventh leader.
He walked out of Yiji Hall’s front gate through a floor of pooled blood, glanced back once, then watched the men who had made a show of chasing him all retreat back inside.
“You may keep carelessly taking on contracts, and I will keep coming back. You take money to kill people — I don’t need money.”
The seventh leader made no effort to conceal anything, because he knew there was no need. He had killed the assassins Yiji Hall had dispatched to kill Li Chi, then killed his way into Yiji Hall itself. Even if he said nothing, would Yiji Hall’s people not realize this had to do with the contract on Li Chi?
He was simply that kind of person: if he felt he could come, he came. If he felt continuing to kill might get himself injured, he left.
—
Another half hour passed. The darkest part of the night — roughly an hour until dawn, the sky dark enough to frighten.
Li Diudiu, deep in sleep, heard something with her sharp ears, and rolled upright in an instant, gripping her long saber.
“It’s me.”
Someone spoke in the courtyard.
Li Diudiu pushed open the door and stepped out — then startled badly. Standing in the courtyard was a person with not a stitch of clothing on, holding two sabers in his hands.
The person was utterly bare in this bitter cold, shaking continuously from the chill.
“There was blood all over me. My clothes were soaked through with blood — shoes and socks too… undergarments as well.”
Though the seventh leader was shaking without pause from the cold, his tone still strove for calm. When he mentioned the undergarments, he seemed faintly embarrassed.
He said, “If I came to you wearing blood-soaked clothing, a skilled tracker might follow the trail.”
Li Diudiu had no patience to let him keep explaining. She grabbed him and pulled him inside, then snatched her own blanket and ran back out to throw it over him, before turning to tend to the stove.
The seventh leader wrapped himself in the blanket and let out a long slow breath.
Li Diudiu moved the brazier over, then hurried to fetch water — a large iron kettle, heated until half-boiling, and a cloth soaked in the warm water.
“Wipe yourself down, get the blood moving.”
With those words, Li Diudiu stepped out the door. “Tell me everything when you’re warmed up.”
At that very moment, Yu Jiuling came running over, throwing a coat over his shoulders. He looked in — and caught the seventh leader just opening the blanket to wipe himself down with the warm cloth.
Yu Jiuling recoiled in shock. “What the — Young master Li, why is there a bare-bottomed man in your room!”
Li Diudiu: “…”
The master came out from another room, took one look, and froze.
“What in the—!”
Changmei Daoren jumped in fright. “What manner of supernatural creature is this!”
—
Two quarters of an hour later. Dressed in a set of cotton clothing, wrapped in the blanket, the seventh leader sat cross-legged on the earthen sleeping platform, still cradling a cup of hot tea.
Three people stood facing him, waiting for an explanation.
“I went and killed some people — the ones watching you during the day. You must have noticed.”
The seventh leader said it in a tone of complete indifference. “There were quite a few of them, so I’m quite tired now. Once I finish this cup of tea, may I sleep here for a while?”
Li Diudiu said, “Sleep all you like.”
The seventh leader smiled faintly, then gestured toward the doorway. “There are two hundred-fold-forged sabers out there. Pick whichever one you want — consider it a gift from me.”
He said slowly, “A blade that has drunk deep of blood — that is a true weapon. Blood soaks in and the blade runs cold. I’ve seasoned them for you. They’ve soaked through well.”
—