This was already beyond counting how many times it had happened — the Black Wu forces felt certain that the next moment would see them storming the border pass, yet they always fell just that little bit short. Every single time, just that little bit short, as though the Moon Goddess herself no longer particularly favored the Black Wu people.
The Black Wu people worshipped the Moon Goddess. They called themselves her children. In Black Wu mythology, it was the Moon Goddess who had created this world, and then she had ascended to the moon, continuing to watch over her descendants from above.
Throughout the entire Black Wu Empire, the vast majority of the common people were devotees of the Moon Goddess. Among them, the most devout had founded the Sword Gate several hundred years ago. Every disciple of the Sword Gate was a servant of the Moon Goddess.
The reason it was called the Sword Gate was because the great swordmaster who had founded it all those centuries ago had sworn to guard the Moon Goddess with the broadsword in his hand.
Hundreds of years later, the Sword Gate’s standing within Black Wu had grown ever higher, to the point where even the Black Wu Khan Emperor’s crown had to be placed upon his head by the Sword Gate’s master. The Sword Gate proclaimed to the people that the Black Wu Khan Emperor was the Moon Goddess’s inheritor in the mortal world. To protect the Khan Emperor, the Sword Gate had also established an organization that answered directly to him — later transformed into what became known as the Black Wu Blue Bureau.
Black Wu General Lü Chi’s identity was a complicated one. He was both a general and one of the Sword Gate’s thirty-six swordsmaster, and because he had later been promoted to Grand General and granted the title of Marquis, his standing within the Sword Gate had risen considerably as well.
At this very moment, just when Lü Chi believed his feet were about to step onto Dachu’s border pass, the Chu people once again displayed that jaw-dropping stubbornness and unity.
So Lü Chi was somewhat at a loss to understand. The intelligence reports said that Dachu was already crumbling, with rebellions breaking out everywhere, that the Chu Emperor’s edicts were ignored the moment they left the capital, that across Dachu’s thirteen provinces the military governors might declare themselves kings at any moment, and that the common people had long since lost faith in the Chu court — even viewing anyone in official robes as an enemy.
If all of that were true, then why did the border pass walls keep receiving a steady stream of reinforcements? And those reinforcements weren’t only Chu military troops — most of them were ordinary people and wandering martial artists.
The Blue Bureau’s intelligence had noted that Dachu’s wandering martial artists formed the rebel forces’ main strength. Wasn’t that a contradiction?
What the Black Wu forces simply hadn’t sorted out yet was this: the rebel forces’ main strength could be called the Greenwood Brotherhood, but that wasn’t the same as calling them the entire martial world. The Greenwood Path existed within the martial world, but the Greenwood Path did not represent the whole of it.
Up on the city wall, Li Chi’s shout of “Yanshan Camp — Green Brow Army!” had shaken not only every Chu person present, but the Black Wu forces as well.
Quite a few among the Black Wu could understand the Central Plains tongue. When they had marched south, they had naturally made thorough inquiries, and they knew that the largest rebel force in Jizhou was the Yanshan Camp’s Green Brow Army. They had even made preparations: the first thing they would do upon breaking through the pass would be to recruit the Yanshan Camp, offer its members generous terms, and then drive them forward as the vanguard army to attack Jizhou City.
But before that plan could even be set in motion, they had watched Yanshan Camp’s people take their place on top of the city wall — becoming yet another wall standing in their way.
“Hey — you there, the young one!”
Liu Mu called out toward Li Chi: “Have you got any arrows left?”
Li Chi grabbed a bundle of arrows and hurled it over. This gave Liu Mu a genuine start — that bundle held a solid two hundred shafts, and the young man had thrown it sailing over the heads of countless people. What extraordinary arm strength!
He told himself that once this battle was over, he absolutely had to track down that young fellow. It would be wonderful to have him at his side.
Liu Mu stretched out both arms and caught the bundle, and only then realized that his earlier estimate hadn’t been quite right either — the bundle was heavier than he had anticipated. Yanshan Camp’s arrows weren’t just plentiful with nothing skimped, every single shaft was actually better craftsmanship than what the Dachu Armory produced.
Not that this meant Yanshan Camp’s arrow-making was particularly excellent — it was simply that the Dachu Armory’s arrows had become genuinely terrible.
Liu Mu thought to himself: even rebels understand that a craftsman must sharpen his tools before he can do his best work. But the people inside the Dachu court had forgotten this entirely. All they cared about was squeezing money into their own pockets from every possible source.
With arrows in hand, Liu Mu’s people managed to clear an entire layer of Black Wu soldiers off the siege tower.
“Old Tan!”
Liu Mu called out: “We need to find a way to stop the Black Wu from being able to board the siege towers.”
Tan Qianshou responded: “I know.”
He looked around in all directions but couldn’t find anything suitable. He thought about setting the siege towers on fire, but those towers had been built from freshly felled timber — they weren’t going to catch flame easily.
Right at that moment, a figure flashed past him.
“Make way!”
The young man shouted as he leaped over Tan Qianshou’s head in a single great bound and launched himself directly off the city wall.
“Someone come hold a shield for me!”
The man had leaped onto the siege tower outside the wall, and his voice carried back from midair.
“I will!”
Tan Qianshou reached out, seized a giant shield nearly as tall as a man, and leaped out after him. Standing at the young man’s side with the shield raised, he looked over and asked: “Let me hold the shield — you kill the enemy.”
The young man glanced at him and said: “Forget it. Just keep your shield covering my flank.”
He truly had no regard for a general whatsoever.
While Li Chi was still speaking, his blade was already moving — a Black Wu soldier came up and was cut down, then he stepped left and right, cutting down one on that side, then one on the other, holding the tower’s top layer single-handedly with a ferocity that left the Black Wu fighters unable to fill the gaps.
“Fine man!”
Gan Zhong saw how savage Li Chi was and reached out to grab a giant shield of his own, leaping down from the wall: “I’ll help you!”
He and Tan Qianshou took a side each, using their great shields to deflect arrows for Li Chi. At first the two of them could keep pace as Li Chi dashed back and forth with his blade, but before long they began to struggle, because Li Chi’s back-and-forth movements were simply too swift.
The more Tan Qianshou watched, the more astonished he became — first because of Li Chi’s ferocity, and second because that blade technique tugged at something half-familiar in the back of his memory.
Young Li Chi surged back and forth across the top level of the siege tower, and not a single Black Wu soldier who climbed up could withstand one stroke of his blade. Body after body tumbled from the tower. From the moment he had set foot up there, that tower had become his world, and within his world, he was its master.
The Black Wu forces couldn’t tell how many Chu reinforcements had come. Every soldier who made it onto the wall was cut down and thrown back. In the darkness of night it was impossible to judge clearly, so they had no choice but to sound the horn and withdraw.
They had been locked in fierce combat for a full hour. The wall was littered with bodies in every direction. Where feet passed, there came the sound of stepping through puddles — but what lay underfoot was not water. It was blood.
Watching the Black Wu forces gradually pull back, the Chu people on the wall erupted in a burst of cheers.
Li Chi stood on the siege tower breathing in great ragged gulps. His left shoulder had an arrow shaft jutting from it, and his right thigh had another. When he looked left and right at the two men flanking him, the great shields they carried were bristling with white-feathered shafts.
“I’m sorry, brother.”
Gan Zhong looked at the arrows in Li Chi’s body, his face heavy with guilt. “We failed to shield you.”
Li Chi laughed it off easily. “Only two arrows got through.”
He clasped his hands in a brief salute, then leaped back down to the wall. Walking as he called out: “Is there fire oil anywhere? Burn these siege towers — otherwise they’ll be trouble again tomorrow.”
Liu Mu strode up to Li Chi and looked him up and down from head to toe, then turned to order his personal soldiers to dig out the arrowheads. Zhuang Wudi had already come over, took hold of Li Chi, and started walking: “We brothers will tend to his wounds ourselves.”
Zhuang Wudi’s deepest hatred was for the official military. If it hadn’t been for fighting the Black Wu, he would sooner die than help government troops do anything.
Li Chi naturally understood Zhuang Wudi’s thinking, so he went along with him without giving Liu Mu any further opportunity to say anything. Liu Mu had his mouth open and hadn’t even gotten the next words out before Li Chi was already at the far end of the wall, getting his wounds treated.
Liu Mu watched Li Chi’s retreating figure and suddenly broke into a small smile, murmuring almost to himself: “This young fellow has absolutely no regard for me at all.”
Tan Qianshou laughed: “You think he has regard for me? I told him to hold my shield, and all he did was glance at me and say, ‘Just keep the shield raised.’ Not one more word.”
Liu Mu sighed: “That among the Yanshan Camp rebel forces there should be a figure like this… Ah…”
On the other side, Zhuang Wudi looked toward Li Chi and asked: “How bad are the wounds?”
Li Chi laughed: “Not serious at all.”
Zhuang Wudi personally set to work snipping off the arrow shafts and then using a small knife to cut open the flesh and extract the arrowheads — the heads all had barbs, making it impossible to simply pull them straight out.
Li Chi sat there and let Zhuang Wudi cut open his wounds and dig out the arrowheads as though he didn’t feel a thing, and was even somewhat in the mood for a drink.
“Hey!”
He called across to the other side: “You lot in the official uniforms — got any wine?”
Tan Qianshou called back at once: “Yes!”
He turned and ran to fetch a flask of wine, bringing it straight over to Li Chi. Liu Mu watched Tan Qianshou and stood there dumbstruck, thinking that he himself had been too slow, and said with a look of dissatisfaction: “That wine… it’s mine. I brought it.”
In the end Liu Mu couldn’t hold himself back either, and sauntered over with a show of casualness to Li Chi’s side. He looked down at the young man drinking, while Zhuang Wudi stitched up his wounds. Li Chi sat there without so much as a flicker of discomfort, and even managed a mild expression of disdain for their wine.
“It’s been watered down.”
Li Chi said.
Liu Mu wasn’t having that, and gave a short, indignant sound. “Those wine sellers — would they dare to water down wine they’re sending to me?”
Li Chi glanced at him — the armor of a Fourth-Grade General clearly put no pressure on him whatsoever.
“People in trade love nothing better than to swindle those of you in officialdom. First, because you think they wouldn’t dare, when in fact they would. Second, because your underlings who go to buy the wine almost certainly take a cut from the merchants, and the merchants have to make back what they’re losing somehow — they can only do it by watering the wine.”
Liu Mu thought it over. Was he really saying that all the wine he’d drunk for years had been diluted?
He refused to accept it.
“You say my wine is watered down. Where’s your proof?”
Li Chi reached down to the flask at his own hip and handed it to Liu Mu. Liu Mu took a sip, and then discovered to his astonishment that it really did have a fuller, fiercer, more powerful taste. Then he demanded with some anger: “You had your own wine this whole time and you were asking us for ours?!”
Li Chi said: “What of it if I had my own wine and asked you for yours?”
Liu Mu was struck dumb. He was a dignified Fourth-Grade General, and it was the first time in his life he had been left without an answer, and he thought this young man had quite a thick face, while simultaneously finding there was a kind of logic to what he’d said.
While Liu Mu was standing there puzzled, Li Chi reached out and took the flask back, hanging it back at his hip.
Liu Mu was caught off guard again. You can just take it back like that?
Right at that moment, a startled cry came from the distance.
“The Black Wu camp is on fire!”
Everyone rushed up to look, and sure enough, a line of fire had broken out on the Black Wu encampment side, the fire spreading forward at a rapid pace. The shouting from the Black Wu forces in their confusion carried clearly all the way up to the wall.
“There aren’t many of them who broke in!”
Tan Qianshou was watching the Black Wu encampment through a long-range spyglass as he said it, his voice full of disbelief.
The force that had broken into the Black Wu camp was a cavalry unit — not large at all, as you could tell from the width of the fire line and the number of torches. But that cavalry moved with terrifying speed, sweeping into the Black Wu camp like a wind in the darkness, setting fires as they went, then cutting their way back out like the wind again.
Liu Mu rubbed his eyes, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“Look!”
Someone pointed outside the wall and cried: “They’re burning the Black Wu grain and supply depot!”
Outside the walls, that young man called Tang Pidi led two hundred light cavalry from the grasslands out of the Black Wu grain supply camp completely intact — two hundred in, two hundred out, like a troop of ghost riders whose charge had blazed like a rainbow and whose retreat had swept like the wind.
They had cut straight through and vanished swiftly back into the night.
Li Chi stood there watching this unfold. He didn’t know who commanded that force, but his admiration was boundless.
—