The sky hung dark and dim, clouds churning in the night, like an ocean turned upside down and hung suspended above.

Orange flare-light rose slowly, drifting between heaven and earth.

In the rundown, chaotic back courtyard, a brief and eerie standoff was unfolding.

Jin Yongsheng, having just arrived, took in the surrounding scene with a carefully neutral expression, his gaze wary and suspicious as he studied the figures standing in the dim light.

All four figures looked strangely bedraggled. A young man and an even younger little monk — where they’d come from, no one knew — now flanked Li Yanfeng from front and back. The once-imposing Monkey King was now caked in mud, his face bruised and swollen, clearly having been through some kind of ordeal. Of the four, only Yan Yunzhi, the sole one still relatively presentable in dress and appearance, stood in an oddly strained posture, apparently having been injured in the earlier fight.

The surrounding courtyard was in ruins — several sections of earthen wall had collapsed, and even a rockery had been smashed open, the damage still looking fresh.

It was hard to imagine just how fierce a battle must have raged through this entire courtyard in the brief span of time since Li Yanfeng had shaken off the other two and caught up with Yan Yunzhi. It was hard, in that instant, to even tell which side this young man and the little monk belonged to.

“This girl is yours now.”

“…Hm?”

A simple exchange. Li Yanfeng stood leaning against the half-collapsed rockery, letting out a long breath. Jin Yongsheng took in these words while shooting Li Yanfeng a probing glance in response; Li Yanfeng’s expression, too, hovered somewhere between a smile and something else — his right eye was swollen, bits of mud dropping from the puffed eyelid. The Monkey King wiped the mud away with his hand, his hair a disheveled mess, his gaze calm and unhurried.

The boy and the little monk, having just come through their fight, were now slowly moving about in the dim light, using this brief standoff to steady their breathing.

Where Jin Yongsheng couldn’t see, the boy gave Yan Yunzhi a quiet wave of his hand.

Jin Yongsheng, iron abacus in hand, began cautiously advancing toward Yan Yunzhi; the boy shifted sideways, cutting off Jin Yongsheng’s line of sight to her, while the little monk circled around Li Yanfeng, arms swaying, drawing closer to Jin Yongsheng — if Jin Yongsheng continued forward, the two of them would once again close in on him from both sides.

The four of them formed a slowly shifting quadrilateral; for this brief moment, though, none of them showed open killing intent. Li Yanfeng stood still, Jin Yongsheng wore a faint smile, the boy paced slowly, stretching his arms out and running through a few loosening motions, and the little monk stood with hands on hips, rolling his neck slightly.

Another orange flare climbed into the night sky, its light seeping over the scene.

The boy waved a hand backward, five fingers flicking open and closed between light and shadow.

“…Run!”

Yan Yunzhi retreated backward.

Jin Yongsheng’s gaze snapped to Li Yanfeng. In that instant, a shadow of malice and killing intent surged up across the Monkey King’s face; the muscles of his right arm bulged, and he seized a chunk of bluestone from the ruined rockery beside him, and in an instant hurled it with everything he had straight at Yan Yunzhi.

The rockery cracked apart, stone chips flying.

Almost in the same instant, the boy, who had been slowly moving sideways, had already flung a throwing knife of his own; his toe flicked up the long club Li Yanfeng had dropped earlier, and his hand caught it out of the air.

The shadow of the club was about to whip outward when, from the other side, Jin Yongsheng’s heavy iron abacus came flying through the air.

The thrown knife buried itself in Li Yanfeng’s shoulder, throwing off the stone he’d hurled just enough that it went whistling harmlessly past the boy’s side; at the very same moment, the iron abacus crashed down with a boom onto the wooden club in the boy’s hands, shattering it, and the boy’s body was sent flying backward from the impact.

Yan Yunzhi had already thrown everything she had into a leap toward the distance; in the split second she glanced back, she saw the boy’s figure sent flying more than a zhang backward by the full force of Jin Yongsheng’s iron abacus. That abacus, at full strength, could nearly break through the outer wall of a building — seeing the boy named Long Aotian take that blow head-on made her scalp crawl even from where she stood. But in that moment, all she could do was throw everything into running forward.

At the edge of her vision, she saw the boy’s body tumbling backward through the mud, then his legs hit the ground and, astonishingly, he forced himself half-upright. In the darkness on the other side, Li Yanfeng came charging in like a maddened tiger, his White Ape Arm-Extending Fist swinging down with the force of a meteor hammer riding the momentum of his charge, as though meaning to smash through everything in its path. But the boy didn’t hesitate for even an instant, spreading both arms wide and charging straight to meet him.

With a thunderous boom, the two of them collided head-on. Li Yanfeng, driving forward with the full force of his charge, landed a heavy punch that sent the boy — who had rushed hastily to intercept him, trying to hold him back — tumbling away once more.

In the darkness, the Monkey King’s strides grew huge, his pursuit ferocious. Having been surrounded and worn down earlier by the boy and the little monk, bedraggled and humiliated, he now struck out in a fury, his silhouette in the night taking on a look of pure madness. But in the next instant, his leaping figure was suddenly seized, wrenched, and slammed down onto the ground — the boy’s figure leaping up from behind him.

“Your grandfather…”

Yan Yunzhi burst out of the courtyard, hearing the boy named Long Aotian’s voice ringing dully through the night air behind her, as though his mouth were full of blood, his age far younger than Li Yanfeng’s, yet in that moment displaying something wild and domineering, contemptuous of everything.

“Your grandfather…”

“I’ll let you…”

“…get away, will I—”

Along with that roar came the continuous sounds of grappling and fighting from behind.

Yan Yunzhi ran with everything she had.

Though there had been bad blood between them back in Tongshan — and though her own reputation and honor had been ruined by a single careless remark of his — in this moment, she understood clearly just how difficult it was to stand in the way of both Li Yanfeng and Jin Yongsheng in a night like this.

As for why he was doing this — that was a question that would have to wait for later.

In the dim light, Li Yanfeng and Long Aotian grappled with each other, crashing through another nearby wall. The boy’s mouth was full of blood, yet he clung to the man, driving one headbutt after another into his face without pause, his eyes now filled entirely with a savage, murderous intent, as though determined to trade lives.

Li Yanfeng had roamed the martial world for decades, prided himself on his own ruthlessness, yet had rarely encountered an opponent this skilled who fought as though he didn’t even value his own life. But on reflection, it made a certain sense — the other party was only fifteen or sixteen years old; what did a kid that age understand about the preciousness of a life? Kids like this were absolutely out of their damn minds!

He had trained and made his name for many years; in terms of overall martial cultivation and internal power, he was genuinely a level above his opponent. And yet, throughout this fight, he found himself utterly unable to suppress the boy’s sheer, reckless ferocity. His fury boiled over, and in the next instant, the boy dragged him down and they rolled together into the mud once more.

Elsewhere, Jin Yongsheng, having suddenly found himself facing the little monk’s attack, wasn’t having an easy time of it either.

He had, after all, only just arrived on the scene, and facing this small figure, he’d been somewhat overconfident at first. But as the little monk came charging at him with wild abandon, the old man — used to a sweeping, expansive fighting style — quickly realized just how troublesome his opponent was. That small figure, wielding a short blade in each hand, attacked only at the knees and below, forcing Jin Yongsheng into a series of awkward, off-balance dodges as he scrambled about, until he was nearly bent double just trying to fend off the blade’s reach.

In sparring and combat across the martial world, there were all sorts of fighting styles, but if one were to rank the most vicious and underhanded, ground-fighting blade and ground-fighting fist techniques would surely rank among the top few. This style of rolling and slashing along the ground looked distinctly unrefined, but in truth, because the feet were far less agile than the hands, this kind of low, ground-level attack was often the hardest to defend against — some armies even trained specifically in ground-fighting blade techniques, since once a battlefield formation broke down, a fighter dropping to the ground to specifically target legs and feet could often achieve remarkably good results.

This little monk’s bladework was clearly an evolution of ground-fighting blade technique, specifically adapted to suit his own height — Jin Yongsheng had no idea which morally bankrupt elder had come up with something like this. Normally, when adults taught children martial arts, the early years were meant for building a solid foundation, with the killing techniques saved for once the child had grown up — so what was the point of designing an entire fighting style specifically suited to a child’s height? Did that mean it would become useless once the child grew up?

He was, after all, a seasoned veteran of the martial world himself; though accustomed to a sweeping, expansive style, and though his back wasn’t quite what it used to be in his old age, bending low to deal with a vicious, ruthless child wasn’t quite enough to put him in real danger. Still, in the midst of this hurried defense, he found himself completely unable to spare any effort to chase after Yan Yunzhi, and could only curse inwardly at whatever morally bankrupt elder had raised this vicious child while earnestly fending off the boy’s brutal attacks.

And glancing over at Li Yanfeng and that other boy, still grappling and pounding each other amid the rubble, even he couldn’t help but feel his scalp prickle. Compared to the sheer violence of that boy’s attacks, this child’s vicious blade-work actually felt, in some strange way, a shade less terrifying.

Amid the seething chaos of battle, blades sliced across bodies, seemingly carrying away pieces of life itself with every stroke.

Life was growing broken, incomplete.

Liang Siyi, alongside You Hongzhuo, clashed through the hostility-charged streets, and every moment felt as though it might be swallowed whole by that hostility…

…

Liang Siyi remembered a time when getting wounded had been as ordinary as eating a meal.

Or rather, it might be more accurate to say that, during that particular stretch of time, even eating a meal hadn’t been a simple matter at all.

From the first southward push of the Jurchen more than a decade ago, through the fall of the Central Plains, every wave of warfare that broke out struck first and hardest at that stretch of land south of Yanmen Pass and north of the Jin region.

Liang Siyi’s family was from Taiyuan. During the Jurchen’s first southward campaign, this ancient city, under the command of Qin Shaohe, had held out for nearly a year. After the first siege of Bianliang was lifted, the court’s reinforcements never arrived in time, and Taiyuan, its supplies and ammunition finally exhausted, fell — followed by a retaliatory massacre.

Liang Siyi had still been young at the time; she had even forgotten how she had survived, crawling out from that field of mud and corpses.

Her parents died in the chaos of the massacre. Taiyuan burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.

From then on, the sky and the earth, as she saw them, were the color of ash and black.

At some point, a middle-aged man named Wang Juyun arrived in that land of despair, giving aid to the orphaned and starving, teaching them martial arts. She had nearly forgotten when exactly she’d started following behind him. The beggars and starving refugees with nowhere else to go gathered behind this man, who carried a pair of swords on his back and wore a threadbare grey robe. Sometimes there was something to eat; often, everyone went hungry. Some died. Some left.

Amid the intermittent hunger and scattering, there had been much suffering. In those years of ravaging warfare, the land south of Yanmen Pass had nearly all its infrastructure destroyed; those with the means to head south had long since left, leaving behind only the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled — or else bandits who preyed on human flesh. Even those who genuinely wanted to live decent lives, planting a field, would sooner or later suffer at the hands of bandits.

Adoptive father Wang Juyun never stopped saving people amid that wasteland.

He was a man who could have gone south. Once he’d gathered a group of people, he could have led them somewhere better to start over. But year after year, he never left that ruined land. Most of the time, they fought against the bandits infesting that land, clashed with the ragtag forces under Liu Yu’s command, even once ambushed a Jurchen envoy — and sometimes, they lost, their strongholds burned by nearby bandit gangs large and small.

That man with the twin swords never once fell.

As their numbers gradually grew and their strength expanded, so too did the resources they needed. From time to time, someone would suggest relocating; from time to time, someone would leave. Every year, there would be a few occasions when Wang Juyun — his hair turning grey and old with startling speed — would gather the children or young people around him and point toward Taiyuan, telling them: “You are the descendants of the loyal and the fallen. Your fathers and mothers, in that very wasteland, were the first to resist the Jurchen — and they never wavered, even unto death!”

Liang Siyi didn’t know whether her own parents had taken part in any direct resistance, but hearing stories like this now and then, she sometimes felt that even in this ashen, blackened world, there was still some faint glimmer of light.

Being taken in as Wang Juyun’s adopted son or daughter didn’t come with any particular privileges within the army. Over more than a decade, hundreds upon hundreds of children were taken in as his adopted sons and daughters. They went hungry and cold, but every single day they still had to train in martial arts, and those who trained well earned a little extra food.

For a time, there had been considerable hostility and rivalry among these adopted children — they fought each other on the training grounds, and sometimes tempers flared badly enough that lives were lost.

But in those chaotic years, fighting side by side again and again against the bandits ravaging that land and the marauding armies, they gradually built up something resembling family bonds among themselves.

Liang Siyi had clawed her way up in an environment like that — sparring with her adopted brothers and sisters on the training grounds, sometimes beating others black and blue, sometimes getting beaten bloody herself. In those days, medicine was precious and food scarce; there were times, after being wounded, when Liang Siyi herself had no idea how she’d managed to survive.

Adoptive father Wang Juyun, on the rare occasions he appeared, always watched them fighting each other with cold detachment, then coldly taught them how to refine their killing techniques — he was that kind of man, hard and cold as iron and steel. Later, because he’d built the foundations of the “Chaos Master” faction on the backs of his own “children,” some scholars and outsiders often criticized him for his supposed hypocrisy and coldheartedness.

Some of the children, or young people, had also once felt resentment welling up within them; once they’d gained enough ability, they angrily left the “Chaos Master” faction, heading south in search of a better life. The faction did carry out some internal disciplinary efforts over these matters, but in truth, these rarely achieved much.

And so, that army of beggars existing in that wasteland had always seemed, within the broader scope of the realm, something both ordinary and strange. Ordinary, in that this army never managed to hold itself up as a paragon of righteousness or benevolence — but then, the world at large hadn’t had much benevolence to speak of in the first place. And strange, in that this beggar-like force had remained rooted in that ruined territory all along, gradually driving out the many bandits infesting it, slowly cleaning up the wreckage of the past, stubbornly surviving.

During the Jurchen’s fourth southward campaign, they once again found themselves squarely in the path of the strongest Jurchen forces, the Western Route Army… though after that they began joining forces with units from the Jin region and the Huaxia Army, even the meager holdings they’d managed to build were once again swept away entirely in that flood of war.

They endured continuous fighting, clashing repeatedly with the Jurchen and with the splinter forces of the Jin region led by Liao Yiren. The “Chaos Master” faction’s weapons were far from fine, and their training, honestly, couldn’t be called excellent either. If there was one thing worth praising, it was perhaps only that in every single battle, it was always these adopted sons and daughters of the “Wang Family Army” who held the line and were often the first to charge.

Perhaps because they had already endured so many years of hardship, these adopted children who remained within the “Chaos Master” faction rarely broke and fled out of fear when facing a battlefield. Because they didn’t run, the ordinary soldiers beneath them, however weak their combat ability, could often summon the courage to press forward as well.

“You are the descendants of the loyal and the fallen. Your fathers and mothers, in that very wasteland, were the first to resist the Jurchen — and they never wavered, even unto death!”

Over two or three consecutive years of fighting in the Jin region, she had watched too many of her companions die, and had herself fallen in pools of blood more than once. Of a hundred battles, a general dies; a warrior returns home after ten years. On battlefields like that, whether or not a person survived often came down mostly to luck — but beyond luck, there were also those older, more seasoned brothers and sisters who had voluntarily taken on the most dangerous tasks, and some who, in the most desperate moments on the battlefield, had saved her through a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble, sacrificing themselves in the process.

On that kind of battlefield, over the course of more than two years, Liang Siyi lost count of how many brothers and sisters she’d seen off. And she herself had woken up again and again after being wounded.

Some might think that after being wounded so many times, a person would gradually grow used to the feeling — but in truth, no one ever truly gets used to it. With every clash of blade and sword, a person’s life grows more broken, more incomplete, and sometimes… those who survive come to hate themselves for it.

…

“…Go——”

A bedraggled figure crashed and stumbled through the crowd.

Blood ran down from her forehead, staining her vision crimson; the pain and weakness left by every slash of blade and sword across her body continued unrelenting.

The crowd along the road scattered — some fleeing, some charging forward. As her sword-light drove back an attacker in front of her, a long-handled hook-sickle came whistling in from behind; reacting on pure instinct, she pressed her back against the spear’s shaft, the gleaming hook nearly burying itself in her shoulder. Before the attacker could bring his full force to bear, Liang Siyi’s blade and sword slashed through the hook-spear’s wooden shaft, cutting it into three pieces!

She’d lost count of how many cuts and slashes covered her body; the chill of the night air, combined with her body’s gradually weakening state, was starting to make itself felt. But what troubled her most wasn’t any of that — it was the inability to die a clean, honorable death, an obsession that came from the man beside her, You Hongzhuo.

Over those two-plus years of war in the Jin region, the “Chaos Master” faction under Wang Juyun’s command had suffered the highest casualties of any unit.

The army raised on that resource-starved land near Yanmen Pass had, in the past, lacked supplies and sufficient training — its overall battlefield quality, honestly, couldn’t be called high. It was only because of its distinctive internal system of “adopted sons” and “adopted daughters” leading from the front, combined with a middle tier of officers who were disciplined and utterly unafraid of death, that this combination ultimately produced one brutal, large-scale battle after another.

In the eyes of many professional generals, much of that had often amounted to needless casualties.

After more than two years of major fighting came to an end, a great many familiar faces had already died in the flames of war, and the world she’d survived in for over a decade seemed to have grown suddenly hollow and empty. Later, when the Jin region settled into peace, Liang Siyi, who had distinguished herself in several of the fiercest battles, received no small share of honors and praise — but in her heart, she understood clearly that these so-called achievements had, in truth, been built up out of the lives of her dead brothers and sisters; it was simply that she happened to still be alive, and so received all this praise instead.

If they put her in charge of leading troops, she wouldn’t even know where to begin.

When this trip to the Jiangning conference came up, An Xifu, acting on their adoptive father’s orders, had brought her along to “get some fresh air and clear her head,” and she had come as ordered.

Matters on the battlefield and matters in the wandering martial world were, after all, quite different. When she’d been sent to make contact with Miao Zheng, something had gone wrong along the way, getting his entire family killed as a result — for Liang Siyi, this kind of failure, this sense of helplessness, brought her real pain, pain that had been building up inside her.

But the remedy that followed had, in truth, been simple enough.

Assassinate Chen Juefang, do everything possible to make him pay with his life — and if that failed, then pay with her own life instead. Within the Chaos Master faction, there had never been anyone afraid to die — this had always been the army’s basic logic.

Only, she hadn’t expected that the Jin-region wandering swordsman named You Hongzhuo, whom she’d spent these past few days with, would come along as well.

“Go—”

Fighting with everything she had, growling low under her breath — for someone in the wandering martial world who had seen more than enough of life and death, this was, in truth, a rather undignified way to behave. But just as she had once watched her adopted brothers and sisters sacrifice themselves on the battlefield, everyone understood that crying accomplished nothing — all that was left was to fight the enemy with everything you had.

But in this moment, You Hongzhuo was, in the end, different from those brothers and sisters. Though the odds were slim, some part of Liang Siyi still hoped that at some point he would turn and flee, leaving her here alone to throw everything she had left into holding off “Heaven Blade” Tan Zheng and “Cold Crow” Chen Juefang, if only for a little longer.

But he said nothing, only the long saber in his hand growing ever fiercer, clashing against the blade of the closing Tan Zheng in a shower of sparks.

“Go…”

“Get out of here—”

In the night sky, the churning clouds seemed on the verge of collapsing down onto the earth. At one point, amid Liang Siyi’s shouts, You Hongzhuo suddenly turned and charged forward, one hand shoving Liang Siyi’s body aside, the other swinging his long saber backward.

“Heaven Blade” Tan Zheng strode forward and brought his blade down across his arm.

In the instant blood sprayed through the air, the two of them crashed through several pedestrians along the roadside, slamming straight into a shuttered shopfront by the road. It had been a small eatery; with the fighting spreading outside, the owner had boarded up the door. Now, with a resounding crash, the two of them broke through the door and plunged inside. Amid a spray of splintered wood, “Cold Crow” Chen Juefang and “Heaven Blade” Tan Zheng charged in after them in pursuit.

Liang Siyi’s body slammed through the wooden door, pain wracking her whole frame, but she still forced herself to keep moving, trying to make her way toward the back of the building as fast as she could. But behind her, You Hongzhuo, driven by an even greater force, crashed into her from behind, and the two of them tumbled to the ground together in a heap. Liang Siyi felt his hand grab hold of her collar, and the two of them rolled together deeper into the darkness of the building. In the midst of that tumble, You Hongzhuo seemed to kick over a table, and something flew from his hand.

Beneath the low, dark night sky, on this side of the street, Chen Juefang and Tan Zheng pursued them into the eatery’s room, and the next instant, a deafening boom shook the ground, white dust and a shockwave rippling through the eatery before bursting outward in a violent gust.

Everyone up and down the long street turned to look.

Splinters of wood and stone flew through the air.

A figure was thrown out of the building by the blast, tumbling across the street.

Chaos everywhere…

…

As though roused by the disturbance rising up from the earth below, the churning clouds slowly drew closer to the ground, and the cold autumn rain began to fall again, drop by drop.

Centered on the Gold Tower, the massive chaos triggered by the assassination raged on through the long street for nearly a quarter of an hour, the violent rioting swelling outward in every direction before finally being contained and suppressed by the converging forces of the Wheel-Turning King’s faction. But in the course of all this, several offshoots of the chaos had managed to break through the cordon and spread outward toward more distant parts of the city.

At around eleven at night, a gust of chaos swept through Guizhi Street, a hundred zhang or so southeast of the Gold Tower and the Qinhuai River.

This had originally been an unremarkable, narrow little street, its walls damaged from past wartime sieges, home to a fair number of displaced refugees. After eleven o’clock, as a great many signal flares rose into the sky, several groups of the Wheel-Turning King’s men had already passed through Guizhi Street; afterward, a group of a dozen or so men, led by the minor enforcer Fang Jinwen, had temporarily stationed themselves here, keeping watch over the distant waves of disturbance while also ordering the nearby refugees to retreat back into their shacks and tents and not to cause trouble.

At that moment, sparse raindrops began falling from the sky, the torches along the road flickering in response, when suddenly, four figures came bursting out from the dark compounds along the street, charging into the open.

These four figures varied wildly in height and build, chasing and grappling with one another. The young man leading the way had seized a long saber from someone on the street, and in moments had turned nearly half the street into a scene of pure carnage.

For a moment, Fang Jinwen couldn’t tell which of these four were the good guys and which were the bad. But the boy who’d seized the saber fought like a ferocious tiger; a smaller figure moved through the crowd like a phantom, darting and weaving, now visible, now vanished; behind these two, a man had snatched up a long club and was swinging it like a man possessed, locked in the fiercest exchange with the saber-wielding boy; and the fourth figure was an old man, wielding a heavy iron abacus that he swung and smashed about — broken-down tables and chairs along the nearby street were reduced almost to powder at a single touch from that abacus, and even a half-collapsed earthen compound wall was knocked down by a swing of the thrown abacus.

The four figures fought their way down the street, sweeping up several of the Wheel-Turning King’s men who hadn’t managed to get out of the way in time, blood pooling across the ground, before charging on into the nearby cluster of shanties and pressing onward into the distance.

…

In the darkness, Yan Yunzhi fled into the distance.

The broken rib in her chest throbbed with unrelenting pain.