Beneath the desolate moonlight, the young figure that had suddenly appeared surged forward like a wild beast on the hunt.
As if to vent some anger that had suddenly welled up inside him, his fists and feet struck with a fierce, violent power. His forward steps didn’t look fast, but each simple movement landed cleanly, without the slightest hesitation. The last man’s shin had been snapped clean through with a single stomp; the second-to-last hunter’s body seemed to shudder in midair as if struck by some tremendous force; the third-to-last man had barely drawn his blade before the boy, having already snatched up the hunter’s long blade, brought it down on him, sheath and all.
That man’s blade swung uselessly through empty air, his kneecap already shattered, and he staggered backward — but the boy’s advance never slowed.
He now faced the burly, dull-looking farmer. This man had thick, heavy bones and an air of simple honesty about him, but he was clearly already one of the “veterans” among this group of thugs. One hand instinctively reached out to try to steady his companion, who was hopping backward on one leg, while his other hand lashed out toward the attacker bearing down on him.
As the man reached out, the advancing boy released the sheathed blade and extended his own left hand, seizing two of the man’s fingers directly and wrenching them sharply downward. The burly man’s jaw clenched hard; his body held for one brief instant, then his knee buckled and he dropped to the ground with a thud. By now his right hand’s palm, index finger, and middle finger had all been twisted backward, and his left hand came up trying to pry the attacker’s grip loose — but the boy had already closed the distance. With a sharp crack, he snapped the man’s fingers clean off, and just as the man opened his mouth to cry out, the same left hand, still following through from breaking his fingers, drove upward into his jaw. His teeth slammed shut with a crack, and blood sprayed from the corner of his mouth.
The man whose kneecap had been shattered hadn’t even hit the ground yet when the boy, still gripping the burly man’s fingers with his left hand, pressed, twisted, and shoved, every motion brutally forceful — the man’s thick knuckles snapped in his grip as cleanly as dry twigs. The burly man now knelt on the ground, body tilting backward, his howl of pain cut short by the earlier blow to his jaw. The boy’s left hand swept up into the air, met his right hand overhead, and the two fists came together as one, a hammer aimed straight at the man’s face, and slammed downward with brutal force.
From start to finish, it was almost entirely joint-locking, bone-breaking force — the burly man’s body slammed into the ground, sending gravel flying, his body twisted at an unnatural angle.
The man with the shattered knee had barely finished falling when the blade in his hand slipped free, knocked loose out of sheer fright.
In the faint moonlight, the sudden figure spread both arms wide, stretching them out.
Of the six men traveling together, four were already down under this brutal onslaught before they’d even fully grasped what was happening. As the boy’s outstretched hands spread wide in that pose, his stance seemed almost inhuman. He held that stretch for only a moment, then continued to advance, closing the distance.
Someone shouted, “You’re… he’s that boy from earlier today…”
The leader, the one among them with some actual martial training, drew his blade with both hands and, with a wild roar, lunged forward, swinging his blade down in a single strike. The whistling blade fell past the boy’s side and struck the ground — the boy had already closed in, one hand clamping down on the man’s sword-wrist. The man let out a strangled cry, thrashing twice, and his wrist suddenly went slack — he felt no pain, but the strength to hold his blade had simply vanished, and he had no idea what had injured him.
The blade clattered to the ground. The lead man swung a fist, but a far more powerful punch had already landed on his lower abdomen — two solid blows to the gut in quick succession, then one to the left side of his jaw, followed by two more to the stomach. Just as two more blows struck his jaw, he collapsed onto the sloping edge of the highway, sending up a cloud of dust.
The one man left standing had already turned and was fleeing into the darkness, running for the distance.
The figure that had done all the killing turned back, walked over to the hunter still writhing on the ground, and gave him another kick to the head. Then he bent down, picked up the long bow from the man’s back, drew three arrows, and fired them off toward the distance. The fleeing man took an arrow to each leg, then a third arrow to his body, and collapsed in the faint moonlight.
Screams and wails rose beneath the moon, the fallen men either rolling or thrashing on the ground, like maggots writhing blindly in the dark. The lone figure still standing glanced around at the roadside, then slowly walked toward the far distance, over to the man who, though struck by the arrow, was still crawling along the ground. After a moment, he took hold of one of the man’s feet and dragged him back along the road, tossing him down among the others.
All that fell from the night sky was cold, pale moonlight.
Aside from the one who had fled and recognized the dark figure earlier, the rest only now got a somewhat clearer look at his general shape — a boy of no more than ten-some years old, a pack slung across his back, now looking every bit like some monster that had dragged its prey back into its den, surveying them all with a cold, indifferent gaze.
In the night wind, he had even begun humming a strange little tune, one none of them could recognize.
“The sky is clear, the flowers bloom in bunches… under the banyan tree by the pond, a little green frog is being cooked… I’ve already grown up, don’t call me a little kid anymore… mm, mm, mm, little green frog, the frog is home all alone…”
He looked each of them over carefully, standing there by the roadside, seemingly disinclined to speak, just standing alone in the darkness like that until he’d finished humming his favorite children’s song. After a good while longer, he finally turned back and spoke.
“Who sent you? This isn’t the first time, is it?”
The men groaned and moaned, one of them weeping. “Great lord…”
“I’ve already heard enough. It’s fine if you don’t want to say.”
He paused for a moment.
“If you don’t talk, you die here.”
The Huaxia Army’s military discipline was strict, and when it came to handling prisoners, in order to preserve their own humanity, they generally didn’t abuse captives — and Ning Ji had never been taught any interrogation techniques, either. But under Aunt Gua’s teaching, a life for a life and a debt repaid in kind was simple justice; these men had come here to kill, so dying here was more than reasonable.
He didn’t plan to waste much more effort on this.
…
A very friendly exchange was had with the six captives.
Moved by Ning Ji’s candid manner, the six injured men gave a thoroughly sincere account of the whole affair, along with all the various things the Li family of Tongshan had done over the years.
Against the backdrop of chaos unleashed by the Jurchen invasion, the rise of a martial family turned out to be even simpler and cruder than one might imagine. According to the men, before the Jurchens’ fourth southern invasion, the Li family had already built up some modest wealth through its connections to the Great Illumination Sect, though it still fell well short of the older gentry and scholarly families around Tongshan.
Then a Jurchen unit swept into Tongshan. The county’s officials and scholars, weak and useless, mostly chose to kneel before the Jurchens. But Li Yanfeng seized the opportunity — he rallied and encouraged the local villagers around him to flee into the nearby mountains for safety, and since he had martial skill of his own, he drew a large following at the time, even clashing with some of the ruling gentry families in the process.
The gentry who had knelt in surrender at the time had expected to receive the Jurchens’ backing in return. But in reality, Tongshan was a small, insignificant place, and the Jurchens who arrived only wanted to loot what they could and move on. Because of Li Yanfeng’s interference, Tongshan county wasn’t able to raise much in “ransom money,” so the Jurchen unit simply raided the homes of a few of the wealthier local families, burned Tongshan’s county seat to the ground, and didn’t bother pursuing further gains into the mountains.
After emerging from the mountains, Li Yanfeng effectively became the real power in control of Tongshan county — even some of the scholarly families who had originally fled into the mountains alongside him later had their property absorbed by the Li family. Since he now carried the reputation of having led the resistance against the Jurchens, he found it easy to pledge allegiance to Liu Guangshi, and from there went on to recruit all manner of followers, build fortified strongholds, eliminate rivals, and try to build the Li family up into a martial power on par with the legendary Overlord Blade clan of the south.
Under the banner of resisting the Jurchens, the Li family had run roughshod over Tongshan, doing no shortage of misdeeds — for instance, when Liu Guangshi needed to fight in the north, it was naturally the Li family that helped conscript men and press-gang laborers around Tongshan. At the same time, the Li family extorted the local population, gathering up large amounts of money and iron goods — this too was because Liu Guangshi needed to trade with the Huaxia Army in the southwest, and had forced this task upon them from above. In other words, while the Li family had certainly committed plenty of wrongdoing locally, the bulk of what they’d extorted had, in the end, been shipped off to “that damned” southwest.
The six men, having been thoroughly beaten, were of the firm opinion: this was all the fault of the Huaxia Army in the southwest.
And what’s more, apparently the Li family had an old blood feud with that great devil of the southwest — Li Yanfeng’s father, Li Ruoque, had been killed by that very devil years ago, and so Li Yanfeng had sworn undying enmity with the people of the southwest. But in order to bide his time and take his revenge gradually, on one hand he’d modeled himself on the methods of the Overlord Blade estate, raising his own private army, while on the other hand he still had to help extract the local people’s wealth to supply the southwest — something he was, quite honestly, deeply unwilling to do, but since Liu Guangshi demanded it, there was nothing to do but carry it out.
Hearing this account, Ning Ji felt his mood turn somewhat complicated. He almost wanted to laugh, but held it back given how serious the situation was.
At the same time, it was an established fact that the Li family had committed murder locally in order to eliminate rivals, and even kept a private prison within their fortified compound specifically for holding local enemies of the family, torturing them slowly. But even as they laid all this out, the six men, facing the threat to their own lives, still insisted that whatever minor faults the Li family might have, their major conduct remained blameless — after all, he’d resisted the Jurchens, hadn’t he, when none of the local scholars had lifted a finger to do the same — what else was he supposed to do?
By the end, perhaps as the threat of death began to feel less immediate, the leader of the group even tried to kneel and beg mercy on the Li family’s behalf, saying: “Since you righteous travelers have come to no harm, why not simply leave Tongshan now — why insist on making an enemy of the Li family? If the Li family falls, what have the common people of Tongshan done to deserve that? The Li family resisted the Jurchens — on the major point, they’ve done nothing wrong…”
The sky gradually grew pitch-dark, the night wind turning cold, clouds swallowing up the moonlight — it was the moment just before dawn. Ning Ji dragged the six of them into a nearby stand of trees and tied them up, breaking one leg on each of them — these men had killed on the strength of their numbers, and killing all of them outright would have been perfectly justifiable. But since they’d confessed so thoroughly, he decided instead to simply strip them of their strength, leaving them worse off than ordinary men from here on, to figure out how to survive from that point forward — Ning Ji felt this was a reasonably fair punishment. After all, they themselves had said it: these were chaotic times.
As for the Li family, and that Steward Wu who’d sent them out to eliminate every last trace of the affair, Ning Ji was, of course, still furious — though that subjective anger had cooled somewhat after learning about the tangled ties between Tongshan and the southwest, what needed to be done still needed doing. The men before him had made such a big deal out of “major conduct,” and the reasoning had sounded complicated enough — but this kind of nonsense wasn’t exactly a difficult subject back in the southwest.
If Confucian scholars failed to resist the Jurchens while local thugs did, did that make the thugs good men? Ning Ji had always scoffed at that kind of logic. And besides, the urgency of resisting the Jurchens had already faded — with the Jurchens defeated in the southwest, whether they’d ever manage to push into the Central Plains again was already questionable, so whether these men had “at least resisted the Jurchens” was, to Ning Ji, essentially beside the point — and the Huaxia Army felt much the same way.
Of course, after questioning them in detail, he did find himself hesitating somewhat over the next steps. According to what they’d told him, Steward Wu normally lived in the fortified compound outside the city, while Li Xiaoqian and her husband Xu Dong lived inside Tongshan county town itself. Given the Li family’s local influence, taking out any one of them would likely stir up the Li family’s forces both inside and outside the city. He wasn’t afraid of that for his own sake — but Wang Jiang, Wang Xiuniang, and the group of five bookish scholars were still back in Tangjiaji, and if the Li family’s forces mobilized, wouldn’t they risk being captured and dragged back?
And with these six men having had their legs broken instead of being killed outright, word would likely reach the Li family sooner or later regardless. If he delayed too long, things would only get more complicated to handle.
The pre-dawn wind moaned softly as he mulled all this over, walking on toward Tongshan county. The situation was somewhat complicated, but the grand, sweeping journey through the martial world he’d once imagined for himself had finally begun, and his mood was, in fact, quite pleased. It occurred to him, then, that his father naming him Ning Ji had truly been an act of foresight.
Because his name was Ning Ji — “Ji” also meaning “anniversary of death” — his own birthday could just as well be called the anniversary of death for certain bad people out there.
“La la la, little green frog… the frog is home all alone…”
The first pale streak of dawn appeared on the horizon. Long Aotian hummed his tune as he walked on. At this very hour, Steward Wu and his fellow wrongdoers were, for the most part, still home alone, not yet even awake…
Once dawn broke, at the inn in Tangjiaji, Wang Xiuniang and the group of scholars gradually woke as well.
None of them had slept well — their eyes were bloodshot, dark circles ringing their eyes. And upon learning that Little Long had left in the middle of the night, Wang Xiuniang burst into tears again over breakfast, and the others fell into an awkward silence in response.
“Do you think — with how impulsive young Long is — he wouldn’t have gone back to Tongshan, would he?” someone raised the thought over breakfast.
The others considered it for a moment. Fan Heng shook his head. “No. Going back wouldn’t let him get his revenge, would it? He’s not really that reckless.”
Chen Junsheng said, “At a time like this, someone who can walk alone out there isn’t foolish. Little Long’s not stupid.”
No one argued with that, and no one dared add anything further to the worry: after all, if that young, hot-blooded Long really had gone charging back to Tongshan to lodge a complaint or seek revenge, wouldn’t the rest of them, out of simple decency, have to turn back and try to save him?
Could they even save him, though? On reflection, probably not. They’d just end up dragging themselves into it too.
Wang Xiuniang cried for a while over Little Long’s disappearance. Lu Wenke, his eyes red, kept his head down and ate in silence. Throughout it all, Wang Xiuniang stole a few glances at Lu Wenke, but he never once looked back at her. Both of them carried some unresolved feeling in their hearts, the kind that really ought to be talked through — but from yesterday to today, that conversation still hadn’t happened.
Toward the end of breakfast, Fan Heng and the others began discussing the next leg of their journey — by rights, they should be setting off soon — but Xiuniang’s father had only just woken that morning, and according to Little Long, his condition wasn’t yet fit for long travel; he’d need a couple of days of rest. Out of simple decency, none of them could bring themselves to suggest leaving right away.
Everyone’s mood, as a result, felt somewhat strange.
After breakfast, Wang Xiuniang went back to tend to her father. The injuries on her face and body remained, but her mind had cleared, and she resolved to find a moment soon to speak with the scholars, thank them for their care along the way, and ask them to leave right away rather than continue waiting alongside them. At the same time, she desperately wanted to speak with Lu Wenke — if he still wanted her, she would try to persuade him to let go of everything happening here, which would, without question, be a good outcome for her too.
And if Lu Wenke couldn’t let go of whatever was weighing on him, she had no intention of shamelessly throwing herself at him either — she’d simply offer him a few words of comfort and send him on his way home.
For someone experiencing her first real stirrings of feeling, this line of thinking was, without question, deeply painful. The thought of laying everything bare between them, of Lu Wenke simply going home afterward while she nursed her badly injured father and set off on the road once more — what on earth would become of her then? Caught up in such feelings, she wiped away a few more secret tears, and before lunch, she left her room to try to find Lu Wenke alone.
She walked through the inn and around its surroundings several times, but couldn’t find him.
She then went to find Fan Heng and the others, and together they searched further, only to discover that Lu Wenke’s pack was already gone. After asking around nearby, they finally learned where he’d headed: not long before, their red-eyed companion had shouldered his pack and left. As for exactly where, some said he’d headed toward Tongshan, while others claimed they’d seen him heading south.
Everyone was left stunned for a moment, and Wang Xiuniang burst into tears once more. Two possibilities now presented themselves — either Lu Wenke truly couldn’t stomach his anger and, with Little Long having not gone back himself, had rushed off to Tongshan in his place, or Lu Wenke, feeling he’d lost face, had simply slipped quietly away home. After all, having come together from every corner of the realm, and likely never to meet again, whatever humiliation he’d suffered this time could stay buried in his own heart, never to be spoken of again.
The group discussed it for a while. Wang Xiuniang, swallowing her heartache, thanked Fan Heng and the others and told them they should go ahead and leave. Fan Heng and the rest gave no direct answer, only sighing repeatedly.
By that afternoon, the scholars gathered their belongings and their attendants and, without any formal farewell, quietly departed. Just as their meeting had been a matter of chance, their parting scattered them like duckweed on water — none of them headed toward Tongshan.
That same afternoon, Lu Wenke arrived back in Tongshan county town. He found his way to the county magistrate’s office, and stood by the roadside for a long while, his eyes bloodshot, his arms trembling.
Thinking back over this journey to the southwest and back — five or six thousand li there and back — he’d seen a great many things. The southwest hadn’t been nearly as fearsome as everyone had imagined, and even under the strained circumstances of Dai Mengwei’s rule, plenty of honorable conduct could still be found. Now that the truly savage Jurchens had withdrawn, this was territory under General Liu Guangshi’s control — a general who had always been the one most admired by scholars.
I refuse to believe this world could really be this dark…
I refuse to believe that a single mere warrior could really block out the sun with one hand…
I refuse to believe…
…
He struck the great drum in front of the county magistrate’s office.
He wanted to see for himself —
what this world was truly made of.