The sun had already set, and a burbling little stream flowed through the hills.

On the slope beside the stream, in a spot shielded from the night wind by a large boulder, a small makeshift kitchen had taken shape.

In the newly built stove, firewood crackled and burned. Fragrant rice was cooking in the iron pot, and beside it, skewers of bamboo and wood held roasting fish and frogs that were just beginning to turn golden.

The little monk sat cross-legged nearby, swallowing hard, watching with something like reverence as the youth across from him pulled salt and some kind of reddish spice powder from his medicine case, sprinkling them over the fish and frogs with an almost magical flourish just as they finished roasting. At once, an even more enticing aroma filled the air.

“A-Amitabha. Benefactor, if you cook all this rice, what will you do tomorrow?” The little monk gulped audibly.

“You don’t eat much, do you?”

“T-this humble monk…” The little monk trailed off, fumbling for words.

“It’s fine. We’re both practitioners of the martial arts — everyone deserves a good meal now and then. I was already planning to treat myself tonight. You just got lucky running into me.”

The little monk stared, wide-eyed, as the youth pulled open the small cloth sack beside him and produced half a roasted duck. After a moment, he finally asked, “B-benefactor practices martial arts too?”

“What do you think? Didn’t see that coming, did you? I’m a physician by trade — I study the Five Animal Exercises.”

“Ah, this humble monk knows — tiger, deer, bear, ape, and bird.”

“Wrong. It’s cat-fist, horse-fist, panda-fist, monkey-fist, and rooster-fist.”

“Erm… but Master said—”

“Is your master a doctor?”

“No, he’s a monk.”

“Well then, what does he know about the Five Animal Exercises? Next time you see him, you really ought to correct his mistake.” The youth tore into the roast duck. “…Wait, aren’t you monks not supposed to eat meat?”

“A-Amitabha. Master says all living things chasing and preying upon one another is simply the nature of the world, in keeping with the great principle of the Way. As long as one eats only to fill one’s belly, it makes no difference what one eats — since all things are empty, meat is empty and vegetables are empty alike. So long as one does not fall into greed, there is no need to avoid it entirely. That said, we may not catch fish with nets, nor angle for them with hooks — but if it’s only to fill the stomach, catching them by hand is permitted.”

“Huh… your master’s really got something to him…”

“Hahaha, he’s a fat man, you know…”

The little monk’s alms bowl was piled high with rice, topped with roasted fish, frog, and duck. He cradled it in his hands, stomach growling, while the youth across from him filled his own bowl. Their two silhouettes, lit by the firelight, exchanged a couple of hearty gestures before both bent their heads and began wolfing the food down.

“…Where’s your master now?”

“Master went into the city to find something good to eat. He said following him around wouldn’t do my training any good, so he told me to travel on my own — and not to use his name if I ran into trouble.”

“Huh. Your master’s really got something to him.”

“Hahaha… What’s your name, benefactor?”

“Me? Heh! Now that’s a big deal.” The figure by the rock stood up, and in the firelight looked especially tall, arms spread wide like claws. “My name is — Dragon!”

The voice paused for effect. “Roar!”

“—Proud of Heaven!”

The commanding cry echoed through the night.

“Ah…” The little monk’s eyes went wide. “Dragon… Dragon…”

“That’s right! Long! Ao! Tian!” Long Aotian declared, then promptly crouched back down to shovel rice into his mouth, adding, to seem modest, “You can just call me Brother Long.”

“Brother Long.” Under the spell of the good food, the little monk showed excellent potential as a sidekick. “Your name sounds so fierce, so impressive!”

“Heh heh, of course it does.”

Living in a chaotic age made traveling alone no easy thing, and over these two or three months since leaving the southwest, Ning Ji’s innocent-looking face had swindled plenty of free meals out of grown adults — but he’d rarely met a fellow traveler younger than himself quite like this little monk. Combined with the boy’s decent martial skill, which left a good impression, Ning Ji couldn’t help playing up the swaggering, larger-than-life big-brother-of-the-martial-world persona to his heart’s content. The little monk, true to his innocent nature, kept shooting him looks of genuine admiration under the influence of all that bravado, then went right back to shoveling down his food.

As they ate, the two traded bits of their own stories. Before long, Ning Ji learned that the little monk originally came from the Jin region. The last time the Jurchens had swept south, his mother had died and his father had gone missing; he’d later been taken in by his master, which was the only reason he still had a path forward in life.

The little monk’s master was clearly some renowned figure in the martial arts, and on this journey south with his disciple, he’d apparently crossed blades with quite a few supposedly skilled fighters along the way, even performed a few acts of chivalrous justice here and there — the typical traces left behind by most wandering martial-world figures. Once they’d reached the area near Jiangning, master and disciple had parted ways.

Only when Ning Ji asked for his name did the little monk hesitate. “Master said… I’m not to give my Dharma name once I get here, so I…”

He seemed rather embarrassed bringing this up. Ning Ji nodded understandingly. “Your master’s really got something to him…” A martial arts master of that caliber, arriving in Jiangning, would surely face no shortage of social obligations and flattery from all directions — parting ways with his disciple here, and forbidding him from using his name, was likely meant partly to give the boy real trials to face on his own, and partly a sign of real confidence in his disciple’s skill.

Traveling the martial world came with plenty of unspoken taboos, and since the other party clearly didn’t want to say more, Ning Ji, playing the seasoned traveler, didn’t press the matter. But once he mentioned coming from the southwest, the little monk’s eyes went wide again, and he peppered Ning Ji with questions about how the Black Banner Army of the southwest had crushed the Jurchens.

His parents had died and vanished, respectively, during the last Jurchen invasion south, which left him with a deep hatred of the Jurchens and no small amount of admiration for the Black Banner that had defeated them head-on. Seeing the boy’s expression, Ning Ji grew even more delighted, launching into tales of the battlefield, waving his arms and pontificating grandly, even snatching up a burning branch as if to sketch out a battle map right there on the boulder, barely pausing to eat.

The two of them finished off every last bit of food, chatting by the campfire, occasionally jumping about and gesturing wildly. When Ning Ji told his battlefield stories, he naturally attributed them to others, usually saying “a friend of mine” did this or that. The little monk listened, utterly absorbed, hollering excitedly, practically ready to kneel before the heroes of the Huaxia Army on the spot — though whenever the conversation turned to the finer details of combat techniques and martial styles, he showed a surprising degree of genuine knowledge.

As Ning Ji described his skirmishes with Jurchen scouts on the battlefield, he made up move names on the spot without a second thought, tossing out things like “Yellow Dog Pisses” or “Lion Rams the Wall.” And yet, hearing these descriptions, the little monk could somehow piece together a surprising number of accurate details about the actual technique and sequence involved.

Naturally, whenever this happened, the swaggering Long Aotian would smack the little monk on the head. “Am I the doctor here, or are you? If I say it’s ‘Yellow Dog Pisses,’ then it’s Yellow Dog Pisses! Talk back again and I’ll flatten your head!”

The little monk would clutch his head and crouch to the side, grinning sheepishly. “Oh… okay…”

It was the night of the fourteenth of August. A round moon rose in the sky, sparks drifting upward, and the two young men sat by the great boulder, chattering away happily about this and that. There was so much to tell about the southwest that the little monk’s questions and Ning Ji’s scattered answers seemed like they could go on forever. Eventually Ning Ji said, “You’ll just have to go see for yourself sometime.”

The little monk nodded. “Mm, I do plan to go there someday… After my mother died, maybe my father ended up joining the Huaxia Army.”

Having been taken in by his master, he had lived through war, bloodshed, and more than a few brushes with death, and his memory of his father had long since faded. But drifting through the martial world all these years, he’d never quite let go of the idea of finding his father someday. Perhaps if he found him — with a father and a master both — he’d finally have a complete family, somewhere to belong.

Saying this, he grew a little wistful. Ning Ji picked up a stick and said, “All right, Baldy — since your master won’t let you use your old name, I’ll give you a new Dharma name. Let me tell you, this name is something else — my father came up with it.”

The little monk nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes, please!”

He sat cross-legged, watching as Ning Ji scratched three crooked, sooty characters onto the rock with the charred stick: Sun Wukong.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the name of the mightiest monkey in the whole world.”

“A monkey, huh?”

“The mightiest monkey there ever was—”

By the stream, on the hillside, beside the warm glow of the great boulder, Long Aotian’s shadow danced wildly across the rock face as he told his new little friend the most exaggerated tale imaginable about this monkey. After a while, the little monk’s mouth hung open in astonishment, letting out little gasps of “Wow!”

“Let me tell you, I don’t give this name to just anyone. From now on, wherever you go in the martial world, doing good deeds and righting wrongs — if I ever hear this name mentioned, I’ll know it was you…”

The campfire crackled and popped, and in this fleeting, drifting meeting of two wanderers, sparks occasionally rose into the sky, gradually seeming to weave themselves into the stars above…

…

The glowing embers drifted up into the night sky, floated a short distance across the hillside, and fell as dark, lightless ash, dissolving into the stream. The stream fed into a small river, and the small river wound its way, twisting and turning, into the great river beyond — beneath this vast sky, stretching out into a sprawling, interwoven network of waterways.

More than twenty li from this unremarkable hillside, the Qinhuai River, one branch of that waterway, ran through the ancient city of Jiangning, where countless lights were spreading across the land.

On the western side of Jiangning, clusters of torches blazed fiercely, casting jagged shadows and light across the chaotic streets. This was a night market that had opened up after the Fairness Party had taken the city. The shopfronts lining the street bore signs of having been looted and smashed, some still streaked with black soot from fires, though a number of storefronts now had new owners. All around, crooked wooden stalls had been thrown up here and there, with skilled Fairness Party members setting up their own vending stands. With more and more outsiders pouring in, the place had taken on a lively, bustling air.

Of the Fairness Party’s five great factions, the one with relatively the strictest discipline was undoubtedly the force under “Fairness King” He Wen — when his troops took a city or seized territory, they often managed to leave some of the local character intact. The other factions each had their own particular brand of violence: “Equality King” Shi Baofeng’s people often tried to reason things out, but were the most thorough when it came to stripping away gold and valuables; the troops under “Heavenly King Gao” were the most elite, but once they took a city, three to five days of unchecked plunder by the soldiers was practically standard; the “Wheel-Turning King’s” faction had the most religious followers, and whenever they marched into a city with gongs and drums blaring, they’d simply invoke the name of the “Eternal Venerable Mother” to justify taking whatever they wanted; as for “Yama King” Zhou Shang, wherever his forces passed, not a single wealthy household was left standing — any place of splendor and riches would be burned to the ground without exception. By now, even those merely “relatively well-off,” with modestly comfortable households, often found there was simply no longer any room left for them either.

You Hongzhuo, dressed in worn-looking black clothing, found himself a seat in this night market and ordered a plate of vegetarian mock-meat, a cup of plain water, and a bowl of rice.

While waiting for his food, his gaze swept over the many banners hanging in the dim light around him, along with the white-lotus and radiant-sun emblems visible everywhere — this was clearly a street under the watch of the “Wheel-Turning King’s” Rebirth Army. Having traveled the martial world for years, from the Jin region to the southwest, he had seen a great deal — yet it had been a long time since he’d encountered such a thick, pervasive atmosphere of the Great Illumination Sect as he found here in Jiangning.

He had a long-standing feud with the Great Illumination Sect; his parents and family had originally died at the hands of its followers. Over the years, he had developed something of a habit of drawing close to these foolish believers, looking for chances to sabotage whatever schemes they were plotting.

Of course, there was nothing here yet that called for sabotage. He turned his chopsticks over idly in his hand, mentally reviewing the information he’d just gotten from a well-connected local informant.

His journey to Jiangning had no especially concrete purpose beyond furthering his own martial training — if he had to name one, it would be to gather, within his means, whatever intelligence he could about the inner workings of this Jiangning gathering, on behalf of the Female Chancellor back in the Jin region.

The chaotic gathering had only just begun, with every faction setting up arenas to recruit fighters and build strength — who would end up allying with whom remained wide open to change. But he’d found a contact through martial-world channels, a well-informed source, and had bought some intelligence at a relatively modest price, information that seemed reasonably reliable for the current stage, to use as a reference.

As things stood, the clash most likely to erupt at this Jiangning gathering was between “Fairness King” He Wen and “Yama King” Zhou Shang. Master He Wen demanded discipline and order from his followers, while Zhou Shang was the least disciplined of all — his men were extreme and fanatical, slaughtering every wealthy household wherever they went without exception. By most accounts, these two men represented the two most incompatible extremes within the Fairness Party.

And because of Zhou Shang’s extremist methods, the “Yama King” faction had accumulated friction and disputes with all four of the other factions. Take the “Wheel-Turning King” faction, for instance — the current head of the “Eight Enforcers'” “Undying Guard,” known as “Cold Crow” Chen Juefang, had originally come from a wealthy Jiangnan household and had long been a devout follower of the Great Illumination Sect, regularly dispensing free medicine and donating money and goods, doing a great deal of charitable work. But after the Fairness Party had risen up, Zhou Shang’s people had stormed into Chen Juefang’s household and burned and killed extensively there. This incident had later triggered a massacre involving thousands of people around Lake Tai, and the two sides had effectively become blood enemies over it.

Grudges of this sort against the “Yama King” faction had piled up considerably among the other factions willing to accept the reform and rehabilitation of wealthy households. And over the past year or two, though “Yama King” Zhou Shang and his followers were branded as heretics and demons by the others, their most radical, most uncompromising slogans had also rapidly won them a massive following. They engaged purely in destruction, never in construction — wherever they went, they stripped everyone clean of their possessions before moving on to the next place.

By now, Zhou Shang’s faction had grown enormously powerful, and by numbers alone, was said to have quietly surpassed even the “Wheel-Turning King” faction, which had originally risen on the strength of the Great Illumination Sect.

— This, more than anything, was the biggest reason why “Fairness King” He Wen and the other factions were all quite likely to move against him together.

And besides “Yama King” Zhou Shang quietly becoming public enemy number one, another likely source of conflict at this gathering was the power struggle between “Fairness King” He Wen and “Equality King” Shi Baofeng. Shi Baofeng had originally risen to control much of the Fairness Party’s internal administration under Master He’s patronage, but as his own base of power had grown, he had become increasingly difficult to rein in — by most accounts, he had already grown into a commercial empire even larger than the southwest’s own Zhu Trading Company. To many perceptive figures within the party, this was clearly an intolerable, looming threat.

Among many of the Fairness Party’s upper echelon, it was widely believed that Shi Baofeng’s challenge to Master He’s authority was, in truth, even more serious than that posed by the defiant, uncontrollable Zhou Shang.

And amid this atmosphere — where Master He might move against Zhou Shang, or might move against Shi Baofeng — a certain undercurrent of opinion had also quietly begun to surface. This line of talk held that “Fairness King” He himself was consumed by an insatiable hunger for power, unable to tolerate anyone beside him — and since he currently remained the Fairness Party’s nominal leader and its single strongest faction, this gathering might just as easily turn into a united stand by the other four factions against Master He’s own. The rumors circulating privately about his “hunger for power” seemed designed precisely to build momentum for just such a scenario.

The intelligence this “well-informed source” had provided was reasonable and well-supported, though ultimately fairly standard, run-of-the-mill stuff. Of course, You Hongzhuo had only just arrived here and hadn’t expected to be handed any deeply guarded secrets right away.

Getting a rough sense of the overall picture, then slowly watching how things developed, would sooner or later let him piece together nine-tenths of the truth. And regardless of who ended up beating whose brains out inside Jiangning, he figured he’d mostly just enjoy the show — at most, he might find an opportunity to take a few solid swings at the Great Illumination Sect on the side. With so many people involved, who would even notice one more casualty? They’d hardly have the attention to spare.

As these thoughts turned over in his mind, the server arrived with his food, and You Hongzhuo bent his head to eat a few bites. Around him, the night market buzzed with noise, customers coming and going. Several men dressed in gray-black clothing walked past him, and the server hurried over to greet them warmly, leading them to a table not far ahead.

As You Hongzhuo ate, he glanced over a few times — the men ahead were members of the so-called “Undying Guard,” part of the “Eight Enforcers” under the “Wheel-Turning King.” He found it rather amusing inwardly — a foolish sect like the Great Illumination Sect always did love its flashy, showy titles, and things had only gotten more absurd over the years: “Wheel-Turning King,” “Eight Enforcers,” “Rebirth Army,” “Undying Guard”… If he drew his blade right now and cut one of them down on the spot, would the man really get back up unscathed? And if he actually died from it — the thought alone was almost embarrassing to consider.

Having spent years traveling the martial world, he’d long since learned to observe people using only the corner of his eye, so that onlookers would think he was simply eating with his head down, never noticing he was watching at all. Just then, amid the flickering torchlight nearby, You Hongzhuo’s gaze subtly sharpened, and the movement of his hand slowed, almost unconsciously.

What had caught his eye was the weapon hanging at the waist of one of the “Undying Guard” members sitting with his back to him.

It was a steel whip-mace.

You Hongzhuo had once been quite familiar with weapons like this — he’d even wielded one himself and still remembered some of the key techniques for using it.

Years earlier, before he’d fought his way out of that small mountain village and met Mr. and Mrs. Zhao, he had once had six sworn brothers and sisters. Among them, the stern, scar-faced eldest brother, Luan Fei, had served as a martial-world scout gathering gold and silver for the “Chaos Master” Wang Juyun. Luan Fei had been paired with the gentle-tempered third sister, Qin Xiang, who had a birthmark on her face. The fourth brother, named Kuang Wenbai, was skilled with a single whip — though in truth, he’d come from a branch lodge of the Great Illumination Sect, and in the end… had betrayed them all.

He still remembered the scene of third sister Qin Xiang’s arm being severed, her head cut off…

Later, in Zezhou, after parting ways with Mr. and Mrs. Zhao, he had run into Kuang Wenbai again — and been sent straight to prison by him…

Of the seven sworn siblings, You Hongzhuo had only ever personally witnessed third sister die before his eyes. In the years since, as he moved through the Jin region protecting the Female Chancellor, he had occasionally had the chance to meet with high-ranking figures there. But as for what had become of eldest brother Luan Fei, or whether second brother Lu Guangzhi, fifth brother Le Zheng, and sixth brother Qian Heng had managed to escape the pursuit, he had never once asked anyone — not even Wang Juyun himself.

It was fourth brother Kuang Wenbai’s whereabouts that he had never stopped thinking about…

The flames outside and inside the shop crackled and popped, the smell of smoke, food, and stagnant water — along with a faint hint of rot — drifting through the night air. You Hongzhuo ate slowly, his gaze drifting again and again to that steel whip-mace and the hard-to-place figure wearing it. After a while, he finished his meal, gently set down his chopsticks, rubbed his palms together, pressed them to his face, and sat there in silence for a long while, eyes closed.

His heart raced, impossible to settle. For the moment, he had no idea what to do next…