Night had only just fallen, and already the compound not far from New Tiger Palace was awash with flickering torchlight — squads of guards moved back and forth through the nearby streets and courtyards, torches, blades, and spears in hand.

“Heaven’s Blade” Tan Zheng walked into the courtyard, exchanging greetings, somewhat to his surprise, with Wang Nantuo, who was already there, before bowing even more deferentially toward the figure emerging from the inner courtyard beyond. “Sacred Sect Leader, you’ve come.”

“Ah, Tan Zheng.” The one emerging from within was none other than the massively built Lin Zongwu. “You’ve made good time. Seems the rumors that you look out for your nephew here weren’t exaggerated in the least.”

Tan Zheng bowed slightly. “Sparring with Li Ruoque, back in the day, taught me a great deal about the way of the blade. But, Sacred Sect Leader, what brings you here yourself…”

“I happened to be nearby when this whole fight broke out, so I came straight over.” Lin Zongwu smiled. “By the time I arrived, the assassin had already fled — but judging by his movement, and from what I gathered questioning Yanfeng about the exchange, it seemed very much like that Cloud-Swallowing Monk from before. Heh. Without that iron armor weighing him down this time, not even Zhou Tong could catch him, and neither could I.”

He paused a moment before continuing. “Oh, and Yanfeng is fine. The Cloud-Swallowing Monk’s attack came as a surprise, catching him off guard, but he only suffered minor injuries — quite lucky, all things considered. Go on in and see him. A little hardship now and then is good for a young man — I suspect he’ll go on to accomplish great things.”

With this assessment from Lin Zongwu in hand, Tan Zheng bowed and took his leave, heading further inside. Beyond lay two more courtyards; the innermost one, home to a bamboo grove and ornamental rockery, now had a number of bamboo stalks lying flattened across the ground — some sheared clean through by blade-strokes, others snapped by blunt weapons, clear evidence of a fierce clash having played out here. Li Yanfeng sat bare-chested by the pond near the rockery, his upper body already wrapped in bandages, the wound appearing to be somewhere around his shoulder or back.

A little hardship now and then was good for a young man — but these past weeks, the Monkey King’s own share of hardship in Jiangning had, perhaps, been a touch excessive.

It had all started with the clash on Gold Street. The Cloud-Swallowing Monk had killed Liu Guangshi’s envoy, Gu Anhe, throwing the whole street into chaos, and Li Yanfeng, having initially distinguished himself in the fighting, had then noticed some suspicious figure and given chase, only to end up injured — not seriously, but leaving him looking thoroughly disheveled.

He’d later used the Gold Street incident to fly into a rage at Meng Zhutao, forcing Xu Zhaonan to step in as peacemaker and offer Li Yanfeng generous compensation. And with Gu Anhe dead, Li Yanfeng found himself elevated to the position of real, empowered deputy envoy within Liu Guangshi’s delegation, reaping the greatest benefit from the whole affair.

But only a few days later, at a gathering, Meng Zhutao had openly challenged Li Yanfeng to a duel. Li Yanfeng, only in his thirties, wielded a monkey-style boxing said to have surpassed even his own teacher’s skill, and facing off against Meng Zhutao — whose shoulder was still injured at the time — he naturally had no thought of backing down. And yet, in a bout limited purely to unarmed combat, he had been beaten so badly he’d coughed up blood on the spot and conceded defeat. That was his second injury.

A few more days after that, he’d become caught up in the assassination attempt against Shi Weiyang, Shi Baofeng’s second son, apparently running into a master from the southwest and trading blows with him — only to come away thoroughly battered, his face bruised and swollen. Though it was said he’d ultimately succeeded in driving the man off, according to most accounts, the man had practiced something like the Thirteen Guardians’ Iron Body, Golden Bell technique, which made it difficult to say Li Yanfeng had come out ahead in that exchange at all. This was his third injury.

And now, on the evening of the sixteenth of the ninth month, it seemed the Cloud-Swallowing Monk had come at him suddenly once again. Li Yanfeng had, to his credit, reacted swiftly, swinging his staff to strike back, and with Lin Zongwu rushing over from nearby, the Cloud-Swallowing Monk had fled at high speed — and so this latest assassination attempt, too, had ended with Li Yanfeng suffering only minor injuries.

For a jianghu man who lived by the blade, taking injuries in the course of a match was, of course, an entirely ordinary matter. But Li Yanfeng was, after all, no ordinary jianghu fighter — he came from a distinguished martial lineage, possessed considerable natural talent, and had already established himself as a genuine warlord of this chaotic age. Whether in martial skill or in cunning, he counted as one of the truly notable figures of this turbulent era — which was precisely why, among the younger generation of the Manichaean faithful who had come to Jiangning, Tan Zheng had come to regard him with the greatest respect of all.

And yet, whatever ill star he’d managed to offend, in the span of a mere twenty days, he’d now been struck down four separate times. The jianghu masters within Jiangning capable of actually defeating Li Yanfeng already counted among the very top tier of players in this whole affair — men like Tan Zheng himself, who wouldn’t normally deign to raise a hand against him lightly. And yet — each of these injuries had come about in such an oddly inexplicable fashion that Tan Zheng, seeing him now, found his own feelings rather complicated.

Of course, none of these thoughts were fit to say aloud right now. Some people simply had bad luck; Tan Zheng had seen plenty of it in his years. Take, for instance, that former deputy squad leader in the Deathless Guard who’d apparently once served under him — word had it the man had had his nose smashed to ruin twice in a row recently, spending his days smearing on ointment, in thoroughly miserable shape. And what could one do about it, really? Once your nose has been injured once, and you run into an enemy again, they’ll naturally target that very weakness — it sounds cruel enough when you put it that way, but in truth, it’s just one of the ordinary realities of combat.

Setting aside these idle thoughts, he moved closer to the edge of the bamboo grove and looked around for a moment, soon noticing signs of damage caused by a third kind of weapon, distinct from blade or staff.

“Flowing Cloud Iron Sleeve… this really does look like the Cloud-Swallowing Monk’s own technique. Does he hide blades in his sleeves?”

Tan Zheng turned around to find Li Yanfeng had already gotten up and come over. He was a handsome, tall figure, his body — hardened by years of martial training — as tough as if carved from stone, and even after four separate beatings in recent weeks, his face showed not the slightest hint of dejection.

“Short blades hidden in his sleeves, it seems — the same man as at the Gold Tower that day… His skill with movement really is formidable.”

Tan Zheng nodded. “There can’t be more than a handful of men in this whole world capable of escaping from under the Sect Leader’s own hand.”

“I hear that, in years past, Uncle Tan had some dealings with him?”

“He’s a rootless wanderer, a heterodox master who roams wherever the wind takes him. Back in the Central Plains, our paths crossed a few times, though I’d hardly call us well acquainted. He was present, too, that time at Zhuxian Town when Qin Siyuan was killed, and afterward managed to slip away with his life intact. The man’s reputation isn’t a good one — the Sect Leader has never cared for him…” Tan Zheng shook his head, giving only a brief account of the matter, then frowned slightly. “Though it is strange — word out there is that this time, the Cloud-Swallowing Monk was hired by Wu Qimei and his people, which would explain his assassination of Gu Anhe, meant to disrupt the alliance between Liu Guangshi and the rest of you. That much makes sense. But with Gu Anhe already dead, why hasn’t he gone after any of the other delegations instead — what could he possibly want, coming after you specifically? Could General Liu have some private feud with someone?”

When the incident at the Gold Tower had first occurred, everyone had assumed Wu Qimei had hired a master to come stir up trouble, hoping to derail the Fair Party’s conference — a reasonable enough assumption at the time. But by now, the delegation Wu Qimei and Tie Yan had sent was nowhere to be found; word around town held that they’d already been secretly done away with. Looking back at it now, could this whole affair, in fact, turn out to have been some kind of misunderstanding after all?

Tan Zheng’s brow remained furrowed. Li Yanfeng, standing beside him, was sharper still, and had likely already worked through these same thoughts himself — but he merely shook his head. “In this city of Jiangning today, is there really only this one thing that defies understanding?”

Tan Zheng turned his head. “What exactly does my worthy nephew mean by that…”

Li Yanfeng arched an eyebrow. “Does Uncle Tan really have a clear picture of how the situation in this city is going to resolve itself, in the end?”

In the surrounding courtyards, because of this assassination attempt against the Monkey King, squads of soldiers and guards were, even now, fanning out in every direction to search and investigate — but even in the darkness, in the direction Li Yanfeng had gestured toward, the traces of chaos and clashes both large and small had already grown increasingly plain to see.

Ever since the thirteenth of the ninth month, when “the King of Fairness,” He Wen, had been the target of an assassination attempt, the situation throughout Jiangning had once again begun to grow turbulent — and in the span of a mere three days, it had already returned to, and even surpassed, the level of chaos the city had seen at its very worst, a month or two earlier.

The small spark first struck by this Reading Society business had, in a remarkably short time, grown into a raging blaze.

After nearly two years of untamed growth, this gathering of the five branches in Jiangning had, from the very start, been intended as an opportunity to talk things through, to work toward unification.

And yet the five great kings at the head of the Fair Party — with He Wen leading the charge — had, all of a sudden, seemingly lost their minds entirely, refusing to yield an inch on this particular matter, and from there, with neither side willing to compromise, the conflict had only continued to escalate. If Shi Baofeng and the other three kings openly issuing orders to hunt down Reading Society members could still be considered, more or less, a matter of managing their own “internal affairs,” then He Wen’s move on the twelfth of the ninth month — issuing a King of Fairness edict straight into the other four kings’ own territories, forbidding wanton killings — amounted to nothing less than an open declaration of war, a direct affront delivered right onto everyone else’s own doorstep.

At that point, had someone been able to step in and mediate, had both sides been willing to yield some ground, the whole affair might still have been resolved through talks, and everything could have remained within the bounds of political maneuvering. But on the thirteenth of the ninth month, that broad-daylight assassination attempt out on the street seemed to mark the moment the fuse had finally reached the powder keg itself.

In that assassination attempt, He Wen — who had, it turned out, come well prepared — escaped unharmed, instead mobilizing men he’d already arranged in advance to encircle and slaughter the several dozen assailants in a massive counterstrike; the fighting that erupted along the street could only be described as brutal in the extreme. And the very next day, on the fourteenth, “Heaven’s Slaughter” Wei Xuwen, under that madman Zhou Shang’s own command, was the first to send men storming into a street flying the King of Fairness’s banner. When “the Dragon Sage” Fu Pingbo, responsible for maintaining order, arrived with his men, Wei Xuwen, citing nothing more than “I’ve never liked the look of you,” launched a fierce clash against them right there.

Shi Baofeng and Xu Zhaonan wasted no time following suit with attacks of their own.

Given the way territories had been seized haphazardly over the preceding months, the various holdings within the city had long since become tangled and interlocking, riddled with private grudges beneath the surface. Beneath each of the great kings, there was, moreover, a distinction between directly controlled territory and territory merely operating under one’s banner in name only. Earlier, thanks to He Wen’s own process, the other four kings had all restrained their movements to accommodate him, and once the directly controlled territories had settled down, the smaller factions operating under their names had likewise not dared to stir up trouble — which was precisely why the preceding half-month had remained relatively peaceful.

But now, with all five kings having openly broken with one another, that powder keg had erupted once more.

Within the city, it was Shi Baofeng, Zhou Shang, and Xu Zhaonan who struck the most, sending wave after wave of their own men to clash directly with He Wen’s forces. And yet, in practice, the overall balance of power within the city hadn’t tipped decisively one way despite the fact that three sides — or even all four — were, in effect, ganging up on He Wen; through round after round of skirmishing for territory, both sides had, remarkably, appeared to remain roughly evenly matched.

This was because, relative to the overall situation across the full thousand li of Jiangnan, Jiangning itself, for now, remained little more than a sandbox for these skirmishes to play out in. As the confrontation among the five great kings gradually grew unmistakable, the orders now issuing out of Jiangning went far beyond simply hunting down, or protecting, Reading Society members — a continuous stream of military orders was also going out, orders whose real effects on the ground would only become apparent over the following ten days, perhaps even the better part of a month.

When negotiations at the table could no longer reach any resolution, localized fighting beneath the surface became, in itself, a way of making one’s position unmistakably clear — and at the same time, large-scale military intimidation had become an important bargaining chip in this larger game as well.

These were strange, precarious days indeed.

On the fifteenth of the ninth month, even as the fighting within the city grew fiercer, the Fair Party’s originally scheduled conference session went ahead as planned regardless. Aside from the five great kings themselves, who did not attend, senior figures such as Chen Juefang, Tan Zheng, Fu Pingbo, Wei Xuwen, and Jin Yongsheng all gathered together without a single one missing, spending the better part of a full day in discussion — and mutual cursing.

Having quarreled openly on the surface, all of them turned, in private, to quietly probing one another for information all the more eagerly.

Li Yanfeng’s own confusion was well founded.

His own brush with assassination this time round was nothing more than the least remarkable of the countless minor incidents unfolding across the chaos-ridden city these past several days — and even someone like Tan Zheng, who had served under Xu Zhaonan’s own Great Radiance faith for a fair while now, found himself genuinely uncertain how the overall situation would ultimately unfold.

On the surface, the situation appeared straightforward enough: Shi Baofeng and the other three were pressing He Wen into submission over the Reading Society affair. But was it truly the case that He Wen, mounting such stubborn resistance against all four of them, had absolutely no cards left to play at all?

Judging from the rumors circulating privately, the most vivid and detailed accounts held that He Wen had already secured an alliance with one, perhaps even two, of the four great kings, and was preparing to purge two or three houses out of existence in a single sweeping move.

Master Xu appeared, on the surface, to stand opposed to He Wen — but might he suddenly switch sides once matters came to a head? Rumor had it He Wen had once extended him the invitation directly: “Let’s do this together.”

The assassination attempt along the street on the thirteenth of the ninth month, some said, had actually been carried out by Gao Chang himself — which would fit his blunt, decisive temperament well enough. And yet, by another set of rumors, Gao Chang remained, all along, the figure most likely to end up standing alongside He Wen.

Shi Baofeng and He Wen had known each other for a long time already. The King of Equality now commanded formidable strength and abundant resources — but in truth, his own faction had originally split off from the very branch under He Wen’s command that had once managed all such resources. Not so long ago, he had used the Reading Society as a pretext to force He Wen into taking a clear stance, and things had escalated directly to this point since — could this, too, have been some scheme the two of them had quietly arranged together in private?

And then there was Zhou Shang — a madman no one particularly liked, who people had, at one point, assumed would be the true target of a combined four-against-one assault. Now that the target had apparently shifted to He Wen instead, was he really any more trustworthy? Even if he hadn’t formally allied with He Wen, the prospect of him turning on his own supposed comrades at the critical moment wouldn’t be the least bit surprising either.

At bottom, the confusion plaguing people’s minds these past few days really came down to a single underlying question: with the Fair Party’s five branches each so different in character, if He Wen genuinely hadn’t managed to unite the other factions behind him, could the remaining four branches, setting He Wen aside, actually manage to merge smoothly into a single unified force on their own?

What sort of compromises would need to be reached among them? What degree of mutual trust and understanding would be required? And in the course of all that, how many further twists and unexpected turns might yet emerge?

No one was naive enough to believe the four houses joining forces could simply and smoothly bring down He Wen outright. Far more likely, the fighting would begin, and somewhere in the middle of it, the four of them would end up locked in a chaotic melee of mutual suspicion among themselves as well.

That this conference had suddenly spiraled into something like this had caught everyone entirely off guard — but at the same time, being able to genuinely see through to where things were truly headed represented an opportunity for each individual player to secure the greatest possible advantage for himself. This was as true for Tan Zheng as it was for men like Li Yanfeng, representing outside interests here.

The two of them stood talking by the edge of the bamboo grove for a while. On the matter of why the Cloud-Swallowing Monk had come to assassinate him, Li Yanfeng chose not to press the subject further, and Tan Zheng, in turn, didn’t push either. After discussing Xu Zhaonan’s own situation for a while, the two of them turned back to the Reading Society — did He Wen genuinely believe in what the Reading Society preached? Had the southwest truly had a hand in any of this? As they walked, Tan Zheng and Li Yanfeng exchanged a few more words about the man Li Yanfeng had faced that day.

“Black Iron God” Qiu Shuyan was the disciple of Ning Yi’s own most formidably skilled concubine — which, in effect, made him practically a direct disciple of Ning Yi, the “Heart Demon” himself. If this man really had come to Jiangning, the whole affair would take on an entirely different complexion.

“I can’t say for certain, myself…” Tan Zheng said earnestly, and Li Yanfeng grew more cautious in turn. “After all, this was the first time I’d ever crossed blades with the man.”

“Did the Sect Leader ask you about this just now?” Tan Zheng said.

Li Yanfeng nodded. “The first time it was Mister Wang who came to ask. But just now, the Sect Leader himself tested my hand personally — though he didn’t say much about whether it was really him or not.”

Tan Zheng nodded, falling silent for a moment. “The rivalry with the Heart Demon is something the Sect Leader has carried privately in his heart for a long while now.”

Li Yanfeng looked at him. “I heard the two of them have never actually crossed blades.”

“I’ve followed the Sect Leader for only a relatively short time myself, and never witnessed that Ning Yi’s skill firsthand.” Tan Zheng said. “But years ago, at Lüliang, there was a whole round of open and covert struggle between the two of them. And later, at Zhuxian Town, when the Heart Demon came with his army — that was, in all likelihood, when they truly crossed blades directly. That battle… in the end, it wiped out nearly the entire previous generation of masters within our own Great Radiance faith.”

Tan Zheng didn’t elaborate much further on this particular matter — that same battle had also been the one in which the previous Monkey King, Li Ruoque, had lost his life, so Li Yanfeng saw no need to press him on it either.

He said quietly, “There have actually always been two competing accounts circulating in the jianghu — some even claim that Heart Demon, Ning Yi, doesn’t actually know any real martial arts at all.”

“That particular claim has been floating around for a long while, growing more elaborate with each retelling as it’s been passed along.” Tan Zheng said with a smile. “People say the Heart Demon knows no martial arts because he devoted himself to military affairs from early on and rarely fought personally. But if you trace things back far enough, you’ll find that before he ever earned the name ‘Heart Demon,’ Ning Yi already carried another epithet entirely — ‘the Bloody-Handed Butcher.’ Just think about it — how many men would a person have to kill, how vicious would he have to be, to earn a name soaked in that much menace? In the jianghu, a man’s given name might be chosen poorly by mistake — but an epithet like that is never given in error. And besides, all these years, whenever we’ve brought up rumors about this Ning Yi to the Sect Leader, he’s always simply smiled and said nothing. Why do you suppose that is? You should know — the Sect Leader rarely speaks of Zhou Tong either, for much the same reason…”

Hearing this, Li Yanfeng understood at once, and nodded. “I’ve heard the Sect Leader once challenged Grandmaster Zhou to a duel, and Grandmaster Zhou never accepted the challenge — later, Grandmaster Zhou died assassinating Nian Han… The Sect Leader respects him.”

“It’s much the same with the Heart Demon. In earlier years, the Great Radiance faith and the Heart Demon clashed on several occasions, and more often than not, we came out the worse for it — but the two of them are, both of them, grandmasters of this age, and there may well be a certain mutual respect between them, kindred spirits despite everything. These past years, as the Sect Leader has campaigned north against the Jurchens, he and the southwest have, in many ways, walked much the same road… But this time, if the Black Banner’s people truly have come to Jiangning, the Sect Leader may well have to consider the prospect of standing against these younger successors himself. His feelings on the matter, in truth, are rather complicated.”

As Tan Zheng shared these more private matters, his face, touched faintly with grey hair, broke into a smile that carried a certain new warmth between the two of them. Li Yanfeng considered this for a moment, his gaze turning resolute. “But my own father died at the Black Banner’s hands. If the opportunity ever arises, I won’t let that Heart Demon go.”

“The opportunity will come.” Tan Zheng patted him on his uninjured shoulder. “The Sect Leader won’t let him go either, I think. Once the realm finally knows true peace, these grandmasters are bound, someday, to have their reckoning.”

The two of them had drifted from talk of the Reading Society into these more private matters. Afterward, Tan Zheng told Li Yanfeng to go rest, and turned to leave. Once outside the compound, he hadn’t gone far before he spotted Meng Zhutao, just then emerging from a nearby residence, preparing to board his own carriage. The two men exchanged greetings, and finding neither had anything particularly pressing to attend to, Tan Zheng spoke up. “Care to walk together a while?”

Meng Zhutao nodded and fell into step beside him, letting his carriage trail along behind. “Coming from the Monkey King’s place, are you, Master Tan? I hear he’s taken another beating?”

“The Sect Leader himself was there earlier, and even he couldn’t manage to hold the assassin. It looked like the work of the Cloud-Swallowing Monk.” Tan Zheng said. “If I didn’t know your own temperament so well, Brother Meng, I might almost suspect you’d hired the man yourself for these last two beatings — that would certainly explain things, the Cloud-Swallowing Monk simply doing a job he’d been paid for.”

Meng Zhutao laughed. Bold and forthright by nature, when he’d taken a dislike to Li Yanfeng, he’d struck him openly on the spot, without bothering to explain himself over lesser matters. “…Why would the Cloud-Swallowing Monk want to kill him?”

“As I see it, there are three possibilities. Perhaps the Cloud-Swallowing Monk wasn’t hired by Wu Qimei’s people at all — perhaps it was Liu Guangshi’s own rivals who hired him. Of course, that would be a rather significant matter, and not one worth speculating too freely about.”

“That whole delegation Wu Qimei sent really has had the worst luck imaginable… What’s the second possibility?”

“That the Cloud-Swallowing Monk is simply doing a job he’s been paid for, hired by someone your worthy nephew has personally offended along the way — in which case, this would simply be an entirely separate transaction. That would make the whole matter considerably simpler.”

“A young man offending plenty of people along the way — that’s hardly anything unusual.” Meng Zhutao’s expression remained even. “And the third possibility?”

“Much like the second — perhaps he offended the Cloud-Swallowing Monk himself directly, in private, for reasons he’s chosen not to disclose, and the Monk simply insists on finishing him off because of it. That, too, is entirely possible. Your worthy nephew is a man who keeps his own counsel — he tends to hold things back on occasion, which leaves the rest of us guessing without much to actually go on…”

The Cloud-Swallowing Monk’s attempt on Li Yanfeng’s life, examined closely, in truth concealed no shortage of possibilities. Li Yanfeng himself, when the subject of the city’s overall situation had come up, had deliberately steered the conversation elsewhere, and Tan Zheng had simply gone along with him, exchanging idle pleasantries in turn. In truth, being the old, seasoned hand that he was, how could he fail to see through Li Yanfeng’s small private concerns? He let out a faint sigh now, thinking it over.

Meng Zhutao merely smiled. “A young man in his thirties, riding high, carving out his own territory on the strength of momentum alone, wearing his own cleverness plainly on his sleeve — none of that is particularly strange.” he said. “He’ll learn better once he’s suffered a real setback or two.”

Tan Zheng smiled as well, and the two of them continued walking along the street together. Ahead, in the night’s darkness, sounds of yet another skirmish could be heard rising. Meng Zhutao arched an eyebrow. “Wei Xuwen, settling some old score again, taking advantage of the chaos, no doubt.”

Tan Zheng sighed. “Brother Meng, tell me — do you truly think our side is going to end up at war with He Wen?”

Meng Zhutao considered this, gazing ahead. “Brother Tan… tell me — do you think He Wen genuinely means to walk this Reading Society road of his, truly and sincerely?”

The long street stretched out beneath the night sky ahead of them; further off, across the city, fires and smoke drifted on without end, painting a dim, chaotic scene.

Riding on the strength of the slogans first put forward by the southwest, the Fair Party had risen up because of He Wen, and had, in short order, expanded rapidly as a result. As for this fierce struggle now underway, most people would say that He Wen’s own faction, standing alone, likely couldn’t hope to prevail against the other four combined. And yet, at this very moment — with the southwest’s own theories spreading alongside its own undeniable record of overwhelming military success — could this vast edifice that was the Fair Party truly go on standing, once stripped of He Wen and the Fairness banner, once stripped of the southwest’s own name behind it all?

In this moment, beneath the night sky, this was a question that countless people found themselves grappling with all at once.

At that very same moment, within New Tiger Palace.

Having finished dealing with the matter of Li Yanfeng and returned to his own quarters, Xu Zhaonan came to pay a formal call.

The two men sat facing each other over tea. Three days after his open break with He Wen, it seemed Xu Zhaonan had, in the meantime, thought the whole matter through with real care — and this time, beneath his seemingly idle conversation, there lurked an unmistakably grave and serious undertone.

Once Lin Zongwu had finished chatting easily with him about the matter of Li Yanfeng, and once Xu Zhaonan had straightened his posture and begun cupping his hands together formally, Lin Zongwu offered a faint smile. “Master Xu, please, speak freely.”

“Zhaonan has committed a grave error.” Xu Zhaonan bowed deeply, his hands clasped, and fell silent for a long moment. “This time… the reason I set aside Mister Wang’s own counsel and traveled north myself to beg you to come out of seclusion, Sacred Sect Leader, was so that we might apply your own teachings on the battlefield itself. Ever since the great battle in the southwest, the soldiers of the Huaxia Army, using the small-unit tactics passed down from Grandmaster Zhou himself, have become capable of serving individually as scouts, every single one of them. If we cannot solve this problem, we will find ourselves unable to face them in battle going forward. And in truth, among the Fair Party’s five branches, our own side holds the greatest concentration of skilled masters — proud, unruly men, difficult to properly command on the battlefield. And so, first, we hoped to draw on the Sect Leader’s own wisdom to train them properly, and second, to use the Sect Leader’s own prestige to keep them in line as well…”

“This time, when the Fair Party’s conference convened, we had all assumed the five branches would join forces smoothly enough, and that afterward, we could devote ourselves fully to training our troops. Who could have guessed that He Wen’s own moods would prove so unpredictable, that he would suddenly turn against us all, acting against every reasonable expectation… If open warfare breaks out beyond these walls, we’re not, in truth, particularly worried. But there is one matter in particular — He Wen has now taken to using the Black Banner as his own protective shield, claiming publicly that people from the Black Banner have already arrived and stand on his side… If that’s genuinely true, then we here would have no choice but to begin preparing early. And should direct confrontation truly come to pass, those among us capable of standing up to the Black Banner through sheer, unmistakable strength are, in truth, not so numerous a group at all…”

Xu Zhaonan laid out his thinking slowly and with great care. Lin Zongwu set down his teacup, his expression calm, betraying no particular surprise. What surfaced in his mind, instead, were all these years of rivalry with the Black Banner — though, in truth, that rivalry had long since ceased in any real sense; even that brief, fleeting glimpse of them back in the Jin territory could hardly still be called any kind of confrontation at all…

He gave his teacup a slow turn.

“On the battlefield, and in matters of quiet strategy alike, Ning Yi is genuinely formidable.” he said.

“Master Xu… have you truly decided, then, not to cooperate with He Wen after all?”

The autumn wind blew cold and bleak, the stars scattered thin beyond the window. Many people, it seemed, were now, little by little, arriving at their own forks in the road of fate.