The bandits who had been pursuing Zhang Yuxu along the city wall had some seventy or eighty killed by Mister Ye in that sweeping rout. The survivors scattered and fled. Some jumped directly from the wall, willing to shatter a leg rather than face Mister Ye again — fear that complete makes people capable of anything, as long as it means escape. Mister Ye still looked for all the world like a well-read gentleman, but the bodies underfoot hadn’t been killed by reading books. Twenty or thirty or so fanned out through the town; pursuit was impractical, and Mister Ye let them go.

From a distance, Xiu Luoluo had watched Mister Ye at his killing work, and chose to stop where he was.

He and Chudong had split up — one pursuing Peng Shiqiu, one pursuing Zhang Yuxu. He didn’t yet know Chudong was dead.

But in this moment, he had no desire to fight that Central Plains man.

Not for lack of confidence in winning — but because the man had a companion, and from what Xiu Luoluo had seen at a distance, that companion had only stood back and watched while one of them slaughtered all those bandits. If two of them were like this, what were the odds of coming out ahead?

If it were one on one, his competitive nature would have driven him to test himself. But two on one, he calculated no realistic chance.

His understanding of the Central Plains had been revised upward by several degrees.

When he had first arrived, he’d looked around and seen nothing but chaff — a land without heroes.

He had intended to go to Jizhou and kill his way to a satisfying conclusion. Before he’d even reached Jizhou, someone had killed through him to theirs.

So he turned and left. Saving those bandits wasn’t worth the effort — he thought even less of them than other people did. He swept down from the wall, seized two horses at random, mounted one and led the other, and charged out through the north gate.

Out in the open beyond the walls, Xiu Luoluo cast an almost unconscious glance to one side — then hauled his horse to a violent stop.

The animal screamed and reared.

Xiu Luoluo’s eyes went very wide. His face went somewhat pale.

Against the wall at the gate’s side sat a broken corpse, slumped and propped. On the wall above it was a crater. The face was entirely destroyed. The chest had caved in to a horrifying depth.

But he recognized her.

It was Gongshu Yingying.

That beautiful woman. The woman who had seemed, in some small way, to favor him.

He had assumed she had already escaped. He had not imagined she’d been killed here — and that she would die looking like this.

He lingered for a moment. Then Xiu Luoluo let out a long sigh, and urged his horse onward.

This little town had many dead in it today — hundreds of horse bandits, and two women.

—

Xiu Luoluo was gone. Fang Yuzou and Que Nan had gone too.

Li Chi and the others reassembled inside the town. He raised his hand and fired a signal flare into the sky; shortly, a dust-trail came drifting in from outside the walls.

Zhang Yuxu looked at Peng Shiqiu — at all that pale, pale skin — and blinked in astonishment.

“What… happened to you?”

“Did those bandits—” Zhang Yuxu started. “There were over a hundred of them chasing you. They didn’t kill you, but they stripped your robes off?”

“I took them off myself.”

“*Ah.* Is that so?”

Something about those four words didn’t sit right. Peng Shiqiu shot him a glare.

“It was a strategy! I undressed while running so that—”

He didn’t finish. Zhang Yuxu cut in: “So that they went from merely wanting to kill you, to wanting to skin you alive and scatter the pieces.”

The two of them were still bickering when Mister Ye came to stand beside Li Chi.

“I think I lost,” Mister Ye said.

He looked out toward the town’s edge, then continued: “Say whatever penalty you like — only, leave Yu Jiuling out of it.”

Li Chi laughed.

“Mister Ye,” he said, “you’re overthinking it. What if Ninth Brother is willing?”

“Count it as a debt I owe you… Name whatever other condition you like in the future. As for the matter concerning Ninth Brother — let’s consider this settled.”

“Then I’ll need to find paper and brush to record it: on such and such a date, in such and such a year, Mister Ye declared himself indebted — to Yu Jiuling — for one kiss.”

Mister Ye: “…”

Nearby, Zhang Yuxu had still been tangled up in the affair of Peng Shiqiu’s missing garments when that last sentence reached his ears.

His expression lit up.

Eyes going wider and wider, practically throwing off sparks.

He decided this was far more interesting than the business of Peng Shiqiu’s bare chest. This was a considerably large melon, and a rather exciting one.

Zhang Yuxu’s small eyes opened as wide as they could go — and yet somehow still managed to look furtive and sly — as he stared at Mister Ye. Mister Ye turned and found somewhere else to look.

—

Presently, Yu Jiuling came huffing and puffing in from outside the walls — ran all the way up to the group and bent double, drawing deep, ragged breaths.

“Look how eager Yu Jiuling is,” Li Chi observed.

Yu Jiuling, still gasping, didn’t catch any subtext — but he noticed Mister Ye had averted his gaze toward the sky.

Zhang Yuxu studied Yu Jiuling’s face carefully for a moment, then turned to look at Mister Ye with a newfound, profound, heartfelt respect.

—

The group spread out, mopped up the remaining bandits, swept through the town, and gathered everything the bandits had left behind. They loaded up what they could carry.

They had arrived worrying about their shortage of horses. Now every face bore a glow of satisfaction.

Several hundred fine horses — and weapons beyond counting.

Mister Ye sighed to Li Chi: “No wonder Tang Pidi always says your fortune is good — that good things always seem to find their way to you. He’s right, isn’t he.”

Li Chi turned that over in his mind.

Was he really like that?

When he thought carefully, it seemed he was.

His parents had died in a plague outbreak. By rights, an infant still swaddled should have caught it too — but he hadn’t. Yet even that should have meant death; there was no one to care for him, and he should have starved. But his master had found him.

From then on, at every fork in the road, he had always chosen rightly. Whatever he set out to do, it bore fruit.

“Let’s move,” Li Chi said, urging his horse forward. The five of them drove several hundred fine horses before them — a grand procession heading north.

Yu Jiuling was radiant with happiness. The sight of all those horses delighted him; he kept leaping from one to another.

“Ah… being wealthy really does feel this good.”

Zhang Yuxu turned to Peng Shiqiu with great seriousness: “You see that? Fickle and inconstant — that’s exactly what Ninth Brother is. Don’t learn from him.”

“I spit on you!” Yu Jiuling shot back. “Switching which horse I ride counts as being fickle?”

“I think Zhang Yuxu has a point,” Peng Shiqiu said. “Jumping back and forth like that — the horses aren’t happy.”

“What do any of you know about it,” Yu Jiuling said. “Back when I was jumping around at the Twin Stars Pavilion, no matter who was doing the jumping, we were all perfectly happy.”

Zhang Yuxu and Peng Shiqiu exchanged a glance. Neither of them quite understood what he meant.

Li Chi, riding some distance ahead in conversation with Mister Ye, happened to catch that line. He was caught completely off guard by it — and couldn’t hold back a coughing fit for several seconds.

Mister Ye let out a long, resigned exhale.

—

At the Yanshan Camp.

Second-in-command Zhuang Wudi had taken up drinking again. Since returning to the camp he drank every day, drank himself into a stupor most of the time, then slept until the world went dark and the day lost all meaning. When he woke, he drank again. No one could talk him out of it; after a few days of trying, no one tried anymore.

At first, the seventh leader, Huang Jinjia, had come in person a few times, but Zhuang Wudi refused to listen. Day after day, bleary and sodden. Huang Jinjia sighed and concluded that his Second Brother had more or less fallen apart.

He understood it in his heart — it wasn’t Second Brother’s fault. It was Elder Brother who had gone too far, refusing to meet his own sworn brother. How could that not cut deep?

He thought it would pass in time. At worst, he could wait for Elder Brother to come back and persuade him in person.

But Elder Brother never came. Instead, the sixth leader, Xilizi, returned — with only a few thousand ragged survivors trailing behind him, tattered and defeated. When asked about the Elder Brother, Xilizi said he hadn’t seen it personally, but his best guess was that the Elder Brother wasn’t coming back.

All at once, the entire Yanshan Camp was plunged into a state of dread, dark clouds massing overhead.

An army of more than a hundred thousand had marched out. Only a few thousand returned. The first leader himself was likely dead on the battlefield.

The camp’s total remaining strength was just over twenty thousand. More than half of that belonged to Huang Jinjia’s original force.

Xilizi and Huang Jinjia consulted together. They wanted Zhuang Wudi to weigh in — they were waiting for him to sober up and hear what he had to say.

But when Zhuang Wudi heard the news, he went blank all at once, as though all three souls and six spirits had been struck out of him simultaneously.

The moment he understood that Yu Chaozong might already be dead, Zhuang Wudi shot to his feet — walked a few steps — and collapsed, vomiting blood.

From that day on, Zhuang Wudi became a wooden thing. He sat in the same spot all day, every day, as if all sense had been knocked from him. When someone passed, he would call out to them — *Elder Brother*.

The newer members of the mountain stronghold had no idea who he was, and treated him like a village fool. Knowing he liked to drink, someone deliberately watered down the wine they brought him. Zhuang Wudi couldn’t taste the difference — he smiled when there was wine, and stared vacantly when there was none.

It had not been long at all, and already no one thought of him as the Second-in-Command.

The camp had expanded too quickly, its numbers growing at a startling pace; by the time Zhuang Wudi had gone to serve at Li Chi’s side, the Yanshan Camp had still numbered only a few tens of thousands. Coming back now, almost no one in the stronghold knew his face. No one held him in any awe.

Worse still — people noticed that Zhuang Wudi went every day to sit at the entrance to the stronghold where Yu Chaozong had lived, and deliberately made sport of him.

Someone stretched a rope across his path. Zhuang Wudi, oblivious, didn’t notice until he’d gone sprawling — knocked a half-tooth out on the impact. The onlookers laughed themselves breathless, vastly entertained.

If someone who knew Zhuang Wudi happened by and saw this, they might raise their voice and scold those responsible, and word would reach Huang Jinjia and Xilizi. But those two had too many matters on their minds to bother with a broken man.

In truth, they might even have been quietly hoping that this person of highest seniority and longest standing in the stronghold — would meet with some misfortune.

They had come up through the ranks when Zhuang Wudi was still seventh leader, so the familiarity between them had never really been established. And Zhuang Wudi had been absent from the stronghold for so long — had it not been for Yu Chaozong consistently holding his place as Second-in-Command and Third-in-Command, and repeatedly stressing the importance of both Zhuang Wudi and Li Chi, neither of these two men would have drawn a moment’s notice.

—

Dusk.

Filthy and disheveled, Zhuang Wudi sat at the entrance of Yu Chaozong’s former dwelling, head tilted back, watching the sunset.

Perhaps the last light strained his eyes, because tears ran silently down his face — yet he refused to look away, as if there were something in that direction worth seeing.

Several patrolling men passed by. One stooped, picked up a pebble, and flung it at him. It struck Zhuang Wudi’s head with a sharp crack. He didn’t react at all.

Those men walked on, laughing. One of them was already talking about swapping Zhuang Wudi’s meals for dog food tomorrow, just to see if he’d eat it.

And it was at this moment that two figures stepped out of the shadows. They looked at each other. Both gave a short nod. Then, crouching low, they began to creep up silently toward Zhuang Wudi from behind.

—