Li Diudiu thought this was a terribly clichéd scenario—a decent person thrown into a jail cell and set upon by the criminals inside, either beaten to death or beaten half to death.
His Master had told him about situations like this before. His Master said that in jail cells, there are generally three kinds of people you don’t want to cross. The first are those in league with the wardens and guards—the lackeys, bullying others under borrowed power.
The second are death-row inmates. Men who are already standing so close to the end, what is there left to fear or hold back for? These are the most dangerous to provoke.
The third are the old hands—prisoners who have been inside so long the jail is home to them. They may not have powerful connections or exceptional ability, but they know how to get by.
The man before Li Diudiu now looked like a toad. His name was Ragged-Pockmark. Rumor had it that as a child he’d survived some illness that no one could name—barely made it, but the illness left his entire face covered in pitted scars.
He was a death-row inmate, scheduled for execution in autumn. No one had dared to trouble him from the day he arrived, because the story went that he had wiped out an entire family. A vicious murderer like that—even hardened criminals in the jail gave him a wide berth, for fear of being killed in retaliation.
He had been in the cell for half a year now, and he had become the undisputed tyrant of this block. No one dared touch him, yet he could pick on anyone he liked—if someone rubbed him the wrong way, he’d go over and hit them. Either he’d beat someone to death, or he’d get beaten to death himself. He didn’t care which.
Li Diudiu looked at him. Ragged-Pockmark looked back.
Li Diudiu thought: *This man is truly ugly.*
Ragged-Pockmark thought: *This person is truly small. He must be thinking about how ugly I am.*
Li Diudiu thought: *He must be thinking about how small I am.*
Chief Constable Li Changxing had given Ragged-Pockmark an order, and he didn’t dare refuse. He wasn’t afraid of death, but he was afraid of something worse—Li Changxing had a thousand ways to torment him. And if he cooperated, Li Changxing would bring back rewards from outside: even a roast chicken was a delicacy beyond compare in this place.
But the job Li Changxing had given him today presented a slight dilemma. The child in front of him—how old was he, ten? Eleven?
Even if a seventeen or eighteen-year-old stood before him, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. But a child…
“Why are you in here?”
Ragged-Pockmark asked.
Li Diudiu said: “For saving someone.”
Ragged-Pockmark’s brow furrowed slightly. After a pause he asked: “Who did you save?”
Li Diudiu said: “My friend.”
Ragged-Pockmark said: “That’s all right then. At least it wasn’t for nothing.”
Li Diudiu asked: “Why do you say that?”
Ragged-Pockmark said: “If you were in here for saving some stranger you had no connection to, that would be a real injustice. But since you saved your friend, you must have done it willingly.”
Li Diudiu thought about it and concluded that this was the most twisted logic he had ever heard.
“You were arranged here by the authorities to deal with me, weren’t you?”
Li Diudiu looked up into Ragged-Pockmark’s eyes and asked sincerely: “If so, could you tell me how they plan to hurt me? I’d like to prepare myself mentally.”
Ragged-Pockmark said: “It needs to be done regardless, so there’s no harm in telling you. The order from above is to break your four limbs and destroy your mouth—that way you can’t speak what you want to speak, and can’t write what you want to write.”
Li Diudiu said: “That’s not so bad. I thought they were going to kill me.”
Ragged-Pockmark looked at Li Diudiu like he was looking at something incomprehensible. “You think being left in that state is better than being dead?”
Li Diudiu nodded. “Being alive is better than being dead.”
Ragged-Pockmark shook his head. “You haven’t truly suffered. You don’t know what it means when living is worse than death.”
He looked Li Diudiu up and down with some difficulty, then said: “Why don’t you choose yourself. Do you want your mouth destroyed first, or your limbs broken first?”
Li Diudiu said: “I think you’re actually a decent person.”
Ragged-Pockmark blinked. “What do you mean by that.”
Li Diudiu said: “If you were truly someone who did nothing but evil, you wouldn’t bother talking with me like this. You’d just start hitting. Why waste words?”
Ragged-Pockmark shook his head. “What do you know.”
He stepped back a few paces and looked toward the other prisoners in the cell, giving an order: “Get to it. Break his limbs first—that way he’ll still be able to make some noise, and the people in charge will be pleased to hear it.”
There were seven or eight people in the cell. The oldest looked fifty or sixty; the youngest, seventeen or eighteen. Every one of them looked more dead than alive—years without daylight had turned their skin pale, and the grime layered over that pallor gave them the look of corpses freshly crawled up from the earth.
The seven or eight began to close in on Li Diudiu. The oldest one muttered as he shuffled forward: “Kid, don’t blame us. We’ve got to survive too. I’ll make sure they go fast.”
“Stop talking and get it done. We’ll catch an earful if we drag this out.”
“You go first then.”
“Why don’t *you* go first?”
“It’s just breaking some limbs. Nothing to it. Let’s go.”
The group murmured and shuffled around Li Diudiu. He had backed against the cell wall, and in that corner it seemed as if there was no way out—a dead end.
Ragged-Pockmark sat down at the back of the group. He didn’t want to watch.
What was about to happen would be a scene of blood and broken flesh—a child not yet in his teens being beaten to a cripple, his arms and legs shattered, bones likely protruding from the skin. Without treatment, he might not last long. He would die of pain, or he would die of slow suffering.
Ragged-Pockmark sat there, eyes on the ground, murmuring the same few words over and over.
*Namo Amitabha.*
Many in Dachu followed the tradition of Chan Buddhism, which had spread from the western regions. The sutras were complex and obscure, and most ordinary folk knew only this single phrase.
“Wait!”
At that moment, Li Diudiu—backed into the corner—suddenly shouted. The men who had been about to act all paused, as though granting him one final mercy.
“Is there something you want to say?”
One of the prisoners asked.
Li Diudiu said, with complete seriousness: “Think of yourselves for a moment. Locked in this sunless place, you’ve already been through so much suffering. If you get injured on top of that, the physical wounds might be bearable—but the wounds to your conscience will be something you can’t endure. A group of grown men beating a single child, and then getting beaten so badly by that child that you soil yourselves? How embarrassing.”
The teenage prisoner’s eyes lit with a vicious gleam. He pushed through the men in front of him and drove a kick at Li Diudiu’s chest: “You brought this on yourself!”
Li Diudiu sidestepped. The kick drove into the wall. The force behind it was considerable—the young prisoner’s ankle cracked with a sharp, clean snap that everyone must have heard.
That savage kick had crippled its own sender.
Li Diudiu drove his own foot into the young prisoner’s supporting leg. The young prisoner collapsed. Li Diudiu brought his foot down hard, stamping onto the fallen boy’s throat with a ferocity that seemed nothing like a child.
The young prisoner made a gurgling sound in his throat; his eyes rolled back. His body convulsed in rhythmic spasms. He wouldn’t be getting up for a good while.
“I forgot to mention.”
Li Diudiu swept his gaze across the prisoners, speaking word by word: “I am not very old, it’s true. And I did come in here for saving someone. But when I was saving that person, I killed two men. Two constables.”
The moment those words left his mouth, everyone who had been closing in took an instinctive step back.
Li Diudiu straightened his clothes. But he didn’t leave the corner. By now some of the prisoners had realized: Li Diudiu hadn’t retreated to the corner out of fear—he’d retreated there because that position was actually easier to defend. With his back to the walls, he only needed to face what came from the front. His flanks and rear were covered.
“Killing those men was out of necessity. Does killing you lot constitute something different?”
Li Diudiu said: “If you think I’m bluffing, come and test me.”
“Don’t believe him!”
The old prisoner called out loudly: “However dangerous he is, he’s still just a child. Not enough strength. He can’t hold off all of us—everyone rush him at once and see how many hits he can take!”
“Right, he doesn’t have the force.”
The group murmured this—yet no one was the first to rush forward.
Li Diudiu sighed. “Not enough strength… if you knew how much I eat at a single meal, you wouldn’t say that.”
“Out of the way!”
Ragged-Pockmark stood up, took long strides to stand before Li Diudiu, and fixed him with a cold and dangerous stare.
“I underestimated you. Looking at you I thought you were some harmless little child—turns out you’ve got some viciousness in you. If that’s how it is, then there’s nothing to hold back.”
Ragged-Pockmark threw a left punch at Li Diudiu’s face. Li Diudiu shifted right—but Ragged-Pockmark’s martial ability was not poor. The left punch was a feint: as Li Diudiu dodged right, Ragged-Pockmark’s right fist came crashing toward Li Diudiu’s face.
But it seemed as if Li Diudiu had anticipated even this. His rightward dodge had been to draw out the right punch.
The moment the right punch launched, Li Diudiu dropped low into a wide stance and drove a rapid series of blows into Ragged-Pockmark’s groin—more than ten strikes in quick succession, all within the span of two breaths. For someone his age, ten-plus strikes in two breaths was extraordinary.
Every blow landed in the same spot. Ragged-Pockmark’s face contorted like a bitter gourd. Li Diudiu stepped aside. Ragged-Pockmark crashed face-forward to the ground, curled up on himself, howling in pain.
Li Diudiu looked at Ragged-Pockmark’s agonized expression and mused aloud: “I’ve tested this many times now and still find it hard to understand—what is the direct connection between a man’s groin and his face? Why does pain there make the face twist into this shape? And then I thought: why is the face also called a ‘face-egg’ in the old tongue? Maybe it’s not ‘face-egg’ at all—maybe the ancients were writing ‘connected-egg,’ implying they’d already figured this out.”
He could afford to ramble on like this because the moment Ragged-Pockmark went down, all six remaining prisoners stepped back.
These men, long confined to a cell, were mostly the sort who bullied the weak and feared the strong. Otherwise Ragged-Pockmark alone could never have kept them all in line.
With the two most dangerous men in the cell now down, the rest—who had only ever thrown their weight around under someone else’s shadow—didn’t dare to make a move.
Li Diudiu pointed at the oldest prisoner and said: “Now. All of you—break his arms. A man this old, still in a jail cell, still egging others on to go first from the back—he’s clearly rotten to the core. Break his arms, and I won’t break yours.”
The old man backed away, repeating: “Don’t listen to this child’s nonsense—this little wretch is nothing but trouble.”
Li Diudiu shrugged. “I’m going to die regardless—they’ll execute me for killing those constables. But before I die, I can kill all of you first. I only have one life… would I let myself get pushed around right before the end?”
He finally left the corner, because he knew he had control of the situation now.
Li Diudiu raised a finger and pointed it at the old prisoner’s face. “Beat him, or beat me. You choose.”
Li Diudiu thought: *this really is a clichéd scenario*. Good thing that—as this situation had made clear—he wasn’t exactly what anyone would call a decent person. Otherwise he’d have been bullied to death by now.
—