When Li Diudiu had wanted to ride the donkey and flee from those tailing him, he had dismounted and stepped forward to pay his respects — but his feet had made a very deft little movement.

He had kicked the empty liquor flask and a section of blood-stained bandaging into the grass behind him, disguising this small action as stumbling slightly when dismounting from the donkey. He successfully deceived General Luo Geng and his son Luo Jing.

Which was why Luo Geng would later say that this youth seemed rather straightforward.

And it was just as well Li Diudiu hadn’t heard that remark — if he had, he would probably have sincerely complimented the general: What is it, General, that both blinds your eyes and gives them such brilliant acuity?

He waited until the several hundred riders thundered away, then, with a somewhat petty air, opened the money pouch Luo Geng had given him and looked inside. He sat cross-legged on the ground and counted carefully — twice — and discovered it contained fully fifty or sixty taels.

Overjoyed. Absolutely delighted.

Li Diudiu had no idea what a single warhorse was worth. If he had known, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly so pleased — twenty or thirty warhorses were worth far more than fifty or sixty taels of silver.

Earlier, at the Yun Study Teahouse, he had earned fifty or sixty taels; now he had another fifty or sixty; add to that his master’s hundred taels — wasn’t he getting rather close to being able to buy a proper residence?

He had more than a thousand taels’ worth of bank notes on his person. If he had at that moment thought of drawing even a hundred from them, buying a residence would be essentially settled — and yet Li Diudiu had not the faintest such notion.

Having received the silver and feeling pleased about it, even Little Donkey looked fine-featured and bright-eyed to Li Diudiu’s eyes now — though moments ago there had been a fleeting urge to eat it. In Li Diudiu’s mind just then, the little donkey appeared as a gloriously delicious donkey-meat flatbread.

He mounted the little donkey, snapped the little whip, and the donkey trotted forward light as a breeze.

Li Diudiu felt that even the sound of the donkey’s hooves on the ground was pleasing, life truly being like the outline of distant mountains — rising and falling.

Meanwhile, back in Jizhou City.

Changmei the Daoist emerged from a woodpile, looked around, and seeing the suspicious individuals had gone, patted the dust from his robes. He thought that the inn he’d been at before was probably no longer safe to stay at.

While he had been sitting at his divination stall in front of the inn, his sharp eyes — trained over many years on the road — caught sight from a considerable distance of a group of men approaching with unmistakably ill intent. He had experienced every kind of situation in all his years of roaming the world, and his awareness of his surroundings had reached the level of a most cunning old fox among cunning old foxes.

So he hadn’t even bothered packing up the divination stall — it was worthless anyway; the hundred-tael bank note was safe in his robe, and everything else could be abandoned.

He turned and entered the inn, said not a single word, and made straight for the kitchen, climbed out through the kitchen window, and ran at full speed. After crossing two streets, he spotted a familiar place — the woodpile where he and Li Diudiu had once slept.

So Changmei the Daoist crawled in. He didn’t have to wait long before he heard the sound of hurried footsteps passing out front. He waited a good while longer, and when there was no more movement, he came out.

His first order of business was not to find somewhere to hide, but rather to decide that he should make a trip to the Four Pages Academy.

However, he didn’t dare go in the daytime. First, he worried that going there might bring trouble down on Li Diudiu, dragging the boy into the fire. Second, he suspected that the area outside the Four Pages Academy might already have people watching.

He had no one in Jizhou City he could turn to for help, and he didn’t want to implicate anyone while he still didn’t know the background of whoever was after him. After a moment’s thought, he decided to head toward Fengming Mountain.

That was the best place to hide in Jizhou City — the mountain was not high, but the forest was dense. Though the Daoist abbey’s people kept watch at the path into the mountain, the old Daoist was confident that slipping quietly into the woods wouldn’t be too difficult for someone with his skills.

Just as these thoughts formed and he prepared to leave, he suddenly heard a cold laugh from above.

“The tricks of a wandering mountain charlatan. A creeping, scheming wretch.”

This sentence startled Changmei so badly that he shuddered involuntarily. He looked up toward the height, and there atop the wall behind him sat a young man.

The man wore a snow-white long gown and held a folding fan in hand. He appeared to be about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, with fine, handsome yet somewhat delicate features — and in particular, his complexion was so pallid it was as if he’d rubbed three catties of white flour on his face, yet his lips were so red it looked as though he’d just been drinking blood.

“Who are you?”

Changmei asked in a deliberately composed voice.

“My surname is Yao. I’m a man who will do whatever job someone pays me for — that’s a promotional line I came up with myself. What do you think of it?”

The young man looked at Changmei and said: “Though I don’t know why you’re worth two hundred taels, since someone named a price, I came. There is one piece of good news and one piece of bad news for you. Which would you like to hear?”

Changmei gave a wry smile. “Who would want to hear the bad news first?”

The young man said: “The good news is that the person who hired me said you must be brought back alive. The bad news is… they said alive will do — they didn’t specify how alive.”

Having said that, he dropped lightly from the high wall and stepped toward Changmei. “I’m about seven paces from you right now. If you can offer more than two hundred taels, I can give you a one-hour head start.”

Changmei sighed inwardly. What terrible timing that was.

So he turned and ran with all his might.

But he had only taken two or three steps when a searing pain shot through his back — as though something had torn through his flesh and seized his spine directly.

Which was, in fact, precisely what had happened.

The young man caught up in just two strides, reached forward with his left hand, and closed his five fingers around the flesh of Changmei’s upper back. With a single exertion, all five fingers sank in, gripping Changmei’s spine bone in a vice-like hold.

With those five fingers clamped around Changmei’s spine, Changmei’s neck went rigidly straight, his eyes rolled upward, and he could not move a muscle.

“Look — so disobedient.”

The young man said with some regret: “To prevent you from running away again, I’m going to break your arms and legs now. It’ll be a bit taxing to carry you back, but I can try asking whoever hired me for extra pay.”

Changmei said with great difficulty: “No need to break anything. I’ll come with you willingly. I want to know… cough, cough — who hired you to capture me.”

“Answering questions costs one tael of silver per question. Fair price, honest dealings, no cheating young or old.”

The young man smiled. “My name is Yao Wuhen. Yao Wuhen — honest dealings, no cheating young or old. Have you heard of me?”

Changmei: “No…”

The young man said: “That’s fine. I am a man with aspirations to become the world’s greatest assassin. Though you haven’t heard of me now, in the future… damn, you’re about to die, so I suppose you won’t get to hear about me becoming the world’s greatest assassin either.”

He actually seemed somewhat disappointed by this.

Changmei thought for a moment and then said: “I have a hundred-tael bank note in my robe. You just said if I had more than two hundred taels you could let me run for one hour — could a hundred taels buy me a half-hour head start?”

He had noticed that this young man called Yao Wuhen was not quite normal. If he were normal, he wouldn’t have said this much to him — so he simply wanted to test the idea.

Yao Wuhen actually released his grip immediately, and his manner of speaking became more courteous.

“Once silver is involved, you become a client. A client’s requests must be honored.”

Yao Wuhen extended his hand. “One hundred taels, half an hour — not one breath less, not one breath more. Honest dealings, no cheating young or old.”

Changmei turned to face Yao Wuhen. He knew he was absolutely no match for this young man in a fight, so without the slightest hesitation he drew out the hundred-tael bank note. Yao Wuhen received it, examined it carefully, confirmed it wasn’t counterfeit, and nodded.

He leaped back up onto the wall and sat down, then drew a small sand-timer from his robe and set it beside him.

“Half an hour. You may begin.”

The moment Changmei heard those words he turned and ran. He was getting on in years, and his spine was still aching badly from earlier, so when he ran, he veered to one side — and ran his head straight into the wall next to him.

Changmei endured the pain and kept running. This half-hour was life or death.

Yao Wuhen sat atop the wall watching Changmei run into the distance. He was a man who claimed to be honest with young and old alike. Promises made without receiving payment could of course be disregarded — but any promise made after receiving payment, he never reneged on.

The sand-timer flowed silently beside Yao Wuhen. He drew out a paper packet from his robe and, treating it as though it were some precious treasure, carefully opened it — inside was merely a piece of half-eaten flaky pastry.

Changmei ran and stumbled along, not knowing where he could go. Though the other party had not answered his question about who had sent them, he could roughly guess it was people from the official government, so he dared not go near the yamen.

He ran and ran, and suddenly lifted his head to see in the distance a stretch of high walls and gleaming eaves. He had never been to this part of the city; his only thought was to run temporarily toward wherever people were gathered — even a fearsome assassin should not dare to openly seize someone in full public view.

He ran in one breath to the outside of those high gates and grand courtyard walls, where several servants dressed in blue robes and black boots stepped out and stopped him.

“This is Prince’s residence — do not approach carelessly.”

“A Prince’s residence?”

Changmei lifted his head to look, and at a glance read the large inscription beside the gate. In an instant it was as if he were a drowning man who had spotted a plank of wood floating toward him. With a thud he dropped to his knees — dignity be damned, he only wanted to live.

“Please do me the favor of conveying a message — I am an old acquaintance of His Highness. Someone is trying to kill me. I beg His Highness to save my life.”

“An old acquaintance of His Highness?”

One of the servants looked him over — there was no particular ill-treatment, merely asking him to wait at the gate, and adding that if he truly was an acquaintance of His Highness, even standing at the gate entrance, no one would dare touch him.

With that, the servant turned and went inside. Changmei prayed inwardly without stopping — Your Highness, Your Highness, though we have met but once, please, I beg you, come out and show your face.

He was overthinking it. Prince Yu was of such a station that even within his own residence he could not simply come out to see just anyone.

So when the servant returned and told him His Highness would not be coming out, Changmei felt as though the world had suddenly grown considerably darker.

He had extensive experience on the road — but faced with an absolute gap in ability, that experience might be worth less than groveling on the ground.

“His Highness is in the residence and bids me bring you inside.”

The servant couldn’t understand why this Daoist wore such a look of despair — to him, wasn’t it perfectly normal for His Highness not to come out in person? And Changmei, his mind thrown into chaos by anxiety, had only been thinking that if His Highness didn’t come out, he was finished.

“Yes, yes, of course…”

In that brief instant, Changmei felt as though he had passed through fire and ice. He scrambled to his feet and followed the servant in through the gates of the prince’s residence.

To the minute, a half-hour later, Yao Wuhen appeared at the gates of Prince Yu’s residence. Not a single trace of anything could escape his eyes, so he had wasted not one breath in tracking Changmei here.

He looked up at the plaque reading Prince Yu’s Residence and thought to himself: this is going to be a bit tricky.

But he didn’t fear trouble.

He had taken someone’s money, and he had to see the job through — no matter how difficult, it had to be done. This was the most fundamental principle a true assassin should uphold.

Yao Wuhen thought to himself: he really was a man of his word.

—