From the moment Master Qiu entered the mutton soup shop to the moment the young man walked out carrying him on his back, barely a quarter of an hour had passed.

The shop owner had seen only this much — and had not seen, would never know, that behind his shop lay two other young people, flat on the ground.

These two were sentinels Changsun Wuyou had posted outside the trading house. Their misfortune was simply that Zero had not known who they were. He had only thought they looked suspicious.

It was the kind of bad luck that comes from walking down a street, getting slapped out of nowhere, and being told: you just didn’t look like a good person.

On the road out of the city, Zero carried Master Qiu along.

Master Qiu could neither move nor speak. People who passed gave them curious looks but asked nothing.

Getting out of the city was not especially difficult — the exit inspections were nothing like the scrutiny at the gates going in.

A young man carrying an elderly man on his back would make most people think: what a dutiful son.

At the city gate, when the soldiers asked, Zero answered with complete sincerity: “My father has taken a strange illness, so I carried him into the city to find a doctor. He’s been seen now. We’re going back to the village.”

And so the soldiers looked at him with something approaching admiration — a man who walked great distances carrying his father deserved nothing less than respect.

And so Zero, having captured Master Qiu, walked calmly out of Yuzhou without any difficulty whatsoever.

—

Outside the city, in a grove of trees.

Zero set Master Qiu on the ground, then rummaged through his pack until he found a coil of rope and bound him to a tree.

While being bound, Master Qiu’s limbs were still completely rigid, so the resulting posture was somewhat undignified.

Once Master Qiu was secured, Zero reached toward him, and Master Qiu watched that hand approaching and slowly widened his eyes.

He felt the young man draw from two points on his body two extraordinarily fine silver needles — each perhaps an inch and a half long.

Master Qiu was himself a master of hidden weapons. In his youth he had made a name for himself walking the rivers and lakes, and had only withdrawn to serve the Changsun family out of obligation.

Had he remained in that world, he would by now likely be the founding patriarch of his own sect.

Or he might have joined one of the rebel forces, and with his abilities, risen to the rank of general long ago.

“Impressive technique.”

Master Qiu exhaled slowly, feeling the blood begin to flow through his meridians again. The process of sensation returning — from numbness back to feeling — was not pleasant. Every pore felt as though needles were jabbing through it.

Had the acupoints been left sealed much longer, his limbs might have been permanently crippled.

And so from this one detail, one could see that the young man’s conscience was intact — he had had absolutely no need to unseal Master Qiu’s meridians so soon.

Zero sat down across from Master Qiu, silent for a moment, and then said: “Qiu Luosheng?”

Master Qiu went still. After a moment, he asked: “How do you know my name? No one has spoken that name for at least thirty years.”

Zero said in complete earnest: “I once made a study of every hidden weapons master in the rivers and lakes — I researched every one of them. Though you’ve been absent from that world for thirty years, records of your technique remain. The Twin Plum Blossom Blades — in all the world, only you. You were one of my targets.”

“Targets?”

Master Qiu asked: “Targets for killing?”

Zero shook his head: “Why must everything end in killing… I only wanted to find you all, one by one, and defeat you.”

Master Qiu said: “I’ve been out of the rivers and lakes for years — but some time back I heard a rumor. A young man of seventeen or eighteen who challenged hidden weapons masters one after another, defeated dozens in succession, and then vanished entirely.”

Zero looked at him: “Does it remind you of yourself, back when you were young?”

Master Qiu: “You also chose to serve someone out of gratitude — that’s why you willingly follow the King of Ning?”

Zero shook his head: “I act out of gratitude, yes — but I don’t follow the King of Ning. I told you — I’m not with the Tingwei Army… A man like you is not someone I want to trouble. Someone who gave up their own ambitions and their future for the sake of repayment — that person is unlikely to be bad.”

He looked at Master Qiu: “So answer me one question, and I’ll let you go.”

Master Qiu smiled ruefully: “You and I are the same kind of person. Right now you are what I was thirty years ago — young, as I was young, someone who once defeated dozens of opponents one by one…”

He looked Zero in the eyes and said: “But now you tell me to answer one question and you’ll let me go. The one thing you’re asking about is precisely the one thing I’m here to protect. Young man… you’d do better to give me a clean death in a fair fight.”

He looked at Zero’s hands: “I have never seen a technique like yours. Your mastery of hidden weapons far surpasses mine. But I still want to learn from you.”

Zero was still turning over Master Qiu’s last words.

Master Qiu and he were indeed the same kind of person. People like them were, in truth, tragic — because in their hearts, other people mattered more than themselves.

Even in matters of life and death, the reason was never for their own sake.

For the sake of repayment, Master Qiu had concealed his name and his past for thirty years within the Changsun household, content to be a servant and an old retainer.

For the sake of repayment, the talented young Zero had chosen to enter the Shen Medical Hall. From that day on, there was no more striving, no more ambition, in his life.

They had each been living their own lives, aware of one another’s existence but with no intersection — until one day, Lu Qingluan had appeared before all of them, holding a token.

Eight people had made the same choice: to leave behind the lives they had built, and enter the Shen Medical Hall. And from that day, they had no more names of their own, and became the Eight Parts of the Whole.

They had all once been descendants of soldiers who served under the general who died fighting on the frontier. When Shen Ruzhan had traveled west, their parents’ generation had already fallen.

At that time, the youngest — Qi — had been barely two or three years old. The oldest — Two — had been barely past twenty. Their lives had been struck by catastrophe.

It was Shen Ruzhan who had kept them alive, had found them a person to teach them martial arts, had arranged a path forward.

That had been over ten years ago. Zero had been only seven or eight at the time. Two had been the eldest among them — slightly older than Shen Ruzhan herself had been then.

He knew why Two had later chosen to leave Shen Ruzhan — why he had walked away. Maybe “betrayal” was not the right word. Perhaps he simply could no longer bear the weight of it.

In Two’s finest years, he had encountered Shen Ruzhan — who was the worst possible person for him to have encountered.

“Why did you drift off?”

Master Qiu looked into Zero’s eyes and said: “If I had moved just then, I should have already killed you. Someone like you shouldn’t let his mind wander like that.”

Zero looked at Master Qiu’s hands. The binding ropes had already been separated — hidden weapons masters like this one always carried blades concealed on their bodies. It would be trivial to cut through rope.

Zero asked: “Then why didn’t you move?”

Master Qiu sat in silence for a moment, then answered: “Because we are the same kind of person… because you also didn’t want to move against me. If you had, you’d have killed me back in that soup shop already.”

Zero let out a long, heavy breath.

Master Qiu reached down to the pouch on his belt, took out a pipe, packed the tobacco, lit it, drew a deep breath.

Smoke drifted around him. He did not seem to be planning to leave, or to fight.

“Is the debt you owe — large?”

Master Qiu asked.

Zero gave a small nod: “My grandfather and grandmother. My mother. My younger sister. Myself.”

Master Qiu exhaled a great lungful of smoke and smiled: “That’s not much. Mine was an entire clan…”

Zero was caught off guard. He asked: “What could involve that many people?”

Master Qiu said: “I was young and arrogant then, convinced the rivers and lakes held no one who could match me. As proud as anyone could be.”

“In the capital, drunk on wine and inflated by flattery, I stopped knowing my own limits — and in a brawl, I injured a man from the Yuwen family…”

He exhaled again, heavily.

“Afterward, the Yuwen family pulled strings, and in my lodgings they planted items from the palace — then accused me of plotting to assassinate the Emperor and steal treasures from within the imperial walls…”

Master Qiu said: “I expected at most an autumn execution. What I got was the extermination of nine generations.”

Zero stared at him.

Master Qiu said: “Yes — they are that kind of people. They can determine the life and death of others casually, at will. Not one person’s fate — nine generations’ fate — and to them it is a matter of a single sentence.”

He looked at Zero: “If my benefactor had not spoken on my behalf, and judged me worth keeping alive, I would long since have become a handful of yellow earth, and my nine generations would have become fertilizer for wild grass.”

“So afterward I remained in my benefactor’s household. It has been thirty years now. And you — for what?”

Zero said: “A small border pass in the western frontier. A bloody battle. The garrison commander led twelve hundred border soldiers in a grueling fight lasting over a month. When relief finally arrived, of twelve hundred, only eighty remained.”

“It was a small pass. Just one of countless frontier skirmishes. The people of the Central Plains knew nothing of it. The court sent no commendation or bereavement payment — or perhaps they did, but it never reached the frontier.”

“In truth, in the years before that great battle, the frontier garrison had already gone years without receiving a grain of pay from the court — no supplies, no rations. They sustained themselves on their own.”

“The relief force that came was not from nearby — because nearby posts were all in the same condition, with no troops to spare. The relief came from Liangzhou in the northwest, after a month of forced marching.”

Zero sat there, looking down at his hands, and went quiet.

Master Qiu exhaled loudly again: “Human suffering — was it worth it?”

Zero looked at him: “You chose to repay the debt. Wasn’t it precisely because the world was worth it?”

Master Qiu went silent.

“So your benefactor saved your entire family, which is why you survived?”

Master Qiu asked.

Zero gave a quiet nod: “She stayed at the frontier for a long time, looking after us, arranging a livelihood for all of us. When she left, she had never once said she expected anything in return.”

“On the day she left, a few of us made a token ourselves, and said: if one day you need us, send someone with this token — through any distance, we will come.”

Zero looked at Master Qiu: “Let’s leave it at that. If we keep talking like this, how are we going to fight each other.”

Master Qiu shook his head: “I don’t think I can fight you anymore right now.”

Zero: “Then what do we do?”

Master Qiu shook his head again: “I don’t know.”

Zero sat thinking for a moment, then said: “Go. You’re free.”

Master Qiu was startled: “You’re letting me go? How will you explain yourself?”

Zero smiled: “This one’s a wash. Next time, don’t run into me again. I’d rather not run into you again either. As for how I’ll explain — don’t trouble yourself over that. You’d better think about how you’ll explain it on your end when you get back. You were captured by me — that news will probably reach your people behind the scenes very quickly.”

Master Qiu smiled back: “Then until we meet again.”

Zero rose: “Let’s say, until we never meet. I have no wish to kill someone like you.”

Master Qiu said: “Nor I to kill someone like you… then again — what if I won?”

The two looked at each other, and both raised their hands in a mutual salute.

Watching Master Qiu walk away, Zero let out a long breath, then raised a hand and scratched his hair: “What a nuisance…”

In the distance, Master Qiu walked on, thinking to himself: when I get back, explaining this is going to be quite difficult.

*…*