Chen Fan’s fist and figure came crashing down like a cannon blast.

The dust that had been thrown outward suddenly caved inward, and the two figures crashed back into the ruined shop.

Years ago, among the brothers of the Fang family, Fang Qifo had been the most gifted in both scholarship and martial arts, the most dazzlingly talented of them all. In the martial path, he had mastered both breadth and depth — picking up any of the eighteen weapon disciplines the instant he touched them. Outsiders called him “Nine Manifestations of the Cloud Dragon” — partly for his unpredictable, ever-shifting methods, and partly because, among his many skills, it was Dragon-Form Fist whose essence he had grasped most deeply.

Most martial arts in this world draw their inspiration from the movements of animals or objects in the world — but there are no dragons in this world, and Dragon-Form Fist is a style born instead from meditating on the totem itself. Its punches coordinate footwork with the body’s frame and spine, generating power through leaps and bounds; its technique is grand, flowing, and continuous, and it also excels in grappling, body-shifting footwork, and kicks.

Chen Fan, having come for vengeance, chose deliberately to face his enemy with Dragon-Form technique.

The instant Lin Zongwu caught the brick, his figure had already vanished from where he stood, his feet carrying him several zhang forward in an instant, his body sinking and then rising like a soaring dragon — and by the time he threw his punch, his strength had already reached its peak.

Lin Zongwu hurled the brick aside, blocked hard with both hands, and was struck backward by that punch.

Up close, Chen Fan felt as though he’d punched into thick, viscous paste.

Amid the dust, ripples spread outward, shaking the area in every direction.

Undeterred, Chen Fan unleashed a rain of cannon-fist strikes, countless heavy blows crashing down one after another.

Lin Zongwu retreated step by step, smashing through bricks and stone, his hands spinning and parrying — until, at one moment, both hands suddenly slashed out, breaking apart Chen Fan’s guard and, like the jaws of some surging beast, twisting suddenly to seize his arms.

Amid the swirling, billowing dust, Lin Zongwu’s hands moved like claws stirring the clouds of heaven, roaring as they came.

A grappling technique — Dragon-Form.

This was the move Fang Qifo had once been most skilled at: “Cloud Dragon Reaching Claw.” Used now in Lin Zongwu’s hands, it carried an especially vicious, brutal edge — those two claws, opening and closing, were like the jaws of a bloodthirsty dragon; had this been used against an ordinary martial artist, the moment those claws closed, the man’s arm would likely have been torn clean apart.

But Chen Fan was formidable indeed — in that instant, his arm suddenly sank, the muscles rippling like a great python, and he broke and reversed the hold using Dragon-Form technique of his own. In the blink of an eye, the two of them unfurled a flurry of grapples and counter-grapples, and amid the dust it looked as though hundreds of dragons were coiling and biting at one another, twisting and lunging with every shift of their footwork. Chen Fan’s sleeves and Lin Zongwu’s cassock sleeves both burst apart into a thousand fluttering butterflies of cloth, swept up and scattered by the churning currents of air.

“May Fang Qifo’s spirit bear witness in heaven…”

Around them, the surrounding shops continued to collapse, tiles, beams, wooden frames, tables and chairs all sliding down as the floorboards gave way; the two men’s fight was like a colossal grindstone, everything caught within it either knocked aside or crushed. Amid this fierce, whirling combat, Lin Zongwu’s voice rang out — and almost at the same instant, Chen Fan closed the distance, his arm suddenly shifting from a grapple into a Taiji-style hammer strike, swinging down hard from above.

Crack—

Lin Zongwu’s massive body sank low, his left arm raised in a guard, his right arm pressing down, both hands spinning like a wheel in Taiji fashion, the ground around them splitting apart amid the dust.

“…Knew you’d surpass your master…”

Speaking under such tremendous exertion seemed to give Lin Zongwu’s voice a slight catch. Chen Fan roared and unleashed a relentless chain of blazing, forceful hammer strikes; Lin Zongwu retreated step by step, each footfall driving into the stone flagstones like a piling stake.

Chen Fan had possessed prodigious natural strength since childhood — this was perhaps the first time in years Lin Zongwu had shown any sign of weakness in a raw contest of power. His feet thundered backward three steps, his upper-body guard smashed open, and as Chen Fan drove home a full-force punch, his footwork in Dragon-Form matched with the heavy strike, ripples spread across Lin Zongwu’s cassock, which suddenly caved inward.

The instant the punch landed solidly, amid the dust, a ferocious grin of white teeth spread across Lin Zongwu’s joyful face — his right fist, like a cannon aimed at the heavens, slammed into Chen Fan’s body in the very same instant.

Boom—

Chen Fan was blown backward, his body smashing through the wall behind him, tumbling across the ground; he pushed himself up onto one knee, spat out a mouthful of blood, and then stood.

Amid the dust, that enormous frame swayed for a moment, seeming to stagger back as well; slowly, he spread his arms and walked forward.

His voice, slow and heavy, carried across the dust.

“…must be just as delighted as I am.”

Amid the dust, Lin Zongwu’s face too was now stained with blood; between the two rows of teeth bared in his ferocious grin, a deep crimson gleamed.

Chen Fan smiled.

“If Sikong Nan could see, from beyond the grave, that you’ve made no progress after all these years, she’d be just about as angry as I am.”

“Hahaha… hahahahaha…”

Lin Zongwu seemed briefly stunned by this rhyming retort, then burst into laughter again. Outside the smoke-filled shop, the sounds of fighting across the battlefield had once again grown fierce. Lin Zongwu wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, looking pleased.

“Yes,” he said. “All these years, going round and round chasing fame and fortune, I’ve achieved nothing of consequence in the affairs of the world — no wonder a young one like you would say such things. But Chen Fan, when it comes to the martial path…”

The colossal demon-god pushed aside a crumbling earthen wall, passed through the shuddering dust, his bloodied gaze fixed on the general in the prime of his life, and slowly approached.

“When it comes to the martial path… today, even if Zhou Tong were reborn, even if Fang Qifo and Liu Dabiao themselves stood before me — I would still be inferior to no one.”

The fighting outside raged on. He walked until he stood two arm-lengths from Chen Fan, then stopped, stating this as simple fact. Lin Zongwu’s frame was massive — even taller by half a head than the sturdy, muscular Chen Fan — and the two men faced off amid the dust in a moment of relative calm.

Chen Fan looked back at him.

“Monk, in all my years of training, I’ve never once cared about the martial path. You know why?” He smiled. “Those figures you named — people remember them not for whether their martial arts were number one under heaven, but for what they actually accomplished in this life. Whatever Chen Fan does — vengeance, when it’s vengeance; war, when it’s war — I’ve never once thought, ‘my martial arts are the world’s greatest, so there’s no need to do anything else.’ Monk, if all you’ve achieved in this life is being the world’s number one martial artist, what’s the difference between that and being the world’s number one at eating shit?”

Lin Zongwu’s gaze went briefly blank.

Facing off with heads held high, Chen Fan spread his arms wide.

“Come on then… world’s number one.”

Time held still for a moment.

…

“…Fine.”

The roiling slaughter roared through the heart of the city, sweeping over everything around the old martial yamen.

Looking ahead from a rooftop at the southern end of the street, the Black Banner troops charging forward had long since been swallowed up in the chaos — explosions billowing up, blood blooming out; now and then, masters clashing on rooftops sent astonishing charges sweeping across the scene, and many figures could be seen bursting into blood mid-run and tumbling down.

Binoculars raised, Zuo Xiuquan watched all of this astonishing spectacle from the rooftop. When the Jurchens had rampaged through the land, he had once followed the army, seeing vast, swarming battle lines, seeing tens of thousands routed and fleeing — but he had never before seen fighting within a city as fierce and passionate as this. It wasn’t just the Huaxia Army squads charging forward — the resolve shown by the masters under the Fair Party’s Four Kings and the Great Brightness Sect right now was, to him, no less startling.

Off to one side, he caught sight of a signal sent by a Beiwei Guard member and understood that Yin Ping and the others’ assassination of “Mountain-Opening General” Luo Yan had succeeded. The old man set down one worry and finally spoke to the young woman beside him.

“Everyone says the Fair Party is a rabble, that the green-forest folk can’t hold up in real battle formations — and yet who would have thought they’d show such nerve today. Miss Qi, with all the Huaxia Army’s squads now overwhelmed by the enemy, caught in such a dire situation — surely nothing will go wrong… will it?”

The young woman, her face scarred but still discernibly delicate, lowered her binoculars and thought for a moment.

“Master Zuo, in the later stages of the southwestern war — you know how it was, a real mess. Do you know how long each Huaxia Army unit typically had to hold out against the enemy in a fight?”

“Hm?”

“A few hundred men on a mountain ridge, surrounded by several thousand of the enemy, fighting for half a day to a full day — that’s what we’d call a dire situation.” Xiao Qi wore a faint, knowing smile as she raised her binoculars again. “What’s happening here today is nothing more than a bunch of green-forest masters who think they’ve got the numbers, refusing to accept defeat without bullying the weak a bit first — put plainly, they’ve encircled us without even realizing how many of their own men have already died around them, and so they feel like they have the advantage, and their blood is up. We weren’t originally meant to handle the assault today, but according to the original plan, we’re meant to hold the field for half an incense stick’s time, an incense stick at most — and then the enemy will collapse on their own.”

Her tone was calm; the way she described it, quietly and precisely, sounded more like a verdict being handed down. This was the first time Zuo Xiuquan had seen a Huaxia Army woman’s demeanor on the battlefield, and for a moment he was taken aback — but then he recalled that Zuo Wenhuai and the others who’d gone with him to Fujian had given off much the same impression: outwardly refined and gentle, yet, underneath, cool, meticulous, and utterly decisive in action — composed to the point of being almost cold.

If one stripped away Master Ning of the southwest’s easygoing, jovial mask when meeting people, was this, perhaps, what lay beneath?

“But what of Master Lin’s situation?”

Zuo Xiuquan raised his binoculars again for a moment, then sighed. “You people kept this hidden from this old man before, and I was left in the dark — who would have thought it was Commander Chen himself, come in person. But even if Commander Chen is valiant, a wise commander doesn’t stand beneath a crumbling wall — a man of his standing, the hero who slew Yinshuke — why would he need to go down there himself and brawl with such a brute? And this Lin Zongwu has carried the name of the world’s foremost martial artist for years, relying on nothing more than raw, brute courage — do you people really believe you can have Commander Chen take him down? And what would be the point, even if you could?”

The old man’s expression grew heavy as he spoke, showing real anxiety, tinged with disapproval, over the Huaxia Army’s arrangement here. All his life he had studied the classics; he had spent much time at Zuo Duanyou’s side, occasionally hearing about this or that skilled fighter and remarking, with a sigh, “surely that’s not human” — but always as a kind of idle entertainment, much like watching a show. Just as Qin Siyuan had once looked down on Lin Zongwu, and neglected Zhou Tong — in their eyes, however great Lin Zongwu’s lifelong claim to being the world’s foremost fighter might be, he wasn’t even worth Chen Fan’s little finger. Why bother sending him down there at all?

Hearing this, Xiao Qi’s mouth twitched slightly, a little embarrassed herself.

“…Commander Chen showed up here out of the blue, wanting to do this — we did try to talk him out of it. Uncle Qian couldn’t stop him either, so what could we do? Our brother-in-law didn’t even come himself…”

“To think that He Wen would tell the truth on this matter, of all things…”

“There’s not a true word that comes out of He Wen’s mouth. He’s not the same as he was back then.”

Speaking of He Wen, Xiao Qi shook her head. Back in the southwest, He Wen had been a scholar-knight of both letters and blade, eloquent and skilled, with a genuinely captivating charm — which was, in no small part, why he’d won Lin Jingmei’s affections, and why Ning Yi himself had once tried to keep him, valuing his talent and bearing. But this time in Jiangning, the manner he’d shown on the surface had really changed into something else entirely — spouting all kinds of nonsense and buffoonery, making a poor impression on everyone.

The old man shook his head as well.

“When the false becomes true, the true also becomes false… The Fair Party’s uprising has gathered together nothing but wild, unruly men from the hinterlands — if he didn’t act this way, they wouldn’t fear him.” Toward the “Fair King’s” current manner of conducting himself, he showed a fair measure of approval.

As the two of them spoke, off in the distance, they saw the fight between the two grandmasters spill out of the room and into a nearby courtyard, walls collapsing and trees splintered all along the way; a great tree came crashing down under the force of their collision, sending up a sky full of falling leaves in the noon light of deep autumn.

The old man held his breath for a moment, then remarked with admiration, “Who would have thought Commander Chen’s martial skill was so high — that he could truly stand his ground against Master Lin, matching him blow for blow.”

He didn’t really understand what it meant to “stand one’s ground,” but in any case, the two men seemed to be trading blows evenly, and that, to him, clearly meant they were evenly matched.

Xiao Qi saw it the same way. “Commander Chen inherited the legacy of the Yongle-era Fang clan; his lineage and Master Lin’s are, in fact, two branches that both trace back to the Manichaean Church. Back then, Master Lin drove Fang Qifo and Fang Baihua to their deaths, and Commander Chen killed his sworn-sister, Sikong Nan, in turn. Without the Huaxia Army’s involvement, this would just be an old feud within the Manichaean Church. According to my brother-in-law, the two of them really are among the very best martial artists in the entire realm — a fight like this doesn’t come along every day. Of course, today’s a bit different — with us here, I suspect that if this drags on much longer, Master Lin might end up shot dead by a rifle.”

The fighting visible before them was chaotic and fierce; most of the Huaxia Army was still entangled with the surging enemy, and Lin Zongwu and Chen Fan’s fight was moving too fast and too erratically for anyone to have found a chance to put a bullet in Master Lin yet. As mere spectators with no real insight into the fight, the two watching from here couldn’t say much more about it.

It was mentioning Ning Yi that prompted Zuo Xiuquan to say, “The outside world widely says that Master Ning is a formidable martial artist himself, a grandmaster in his own right — I always assumed that was mere talk, back in the southwest, and never asked further. But thinking on it now — I hear Master Ning and Commander Chen became friends during the siege of Yongle at Hangzhou… could it be that Master Ning really does have some extraordinary skill?”

Xiao Qi nodded. “My brother-in-law, plus several of the martial-arts-trained sisters-in-law in our family — Commander Chen might not even be able to beat them one-on-one.”

“I see.” Zuo Xiuquan nodded, understanding dawning on him. “Last year, at the Grand Martial Tournament in the southwest, I did indeed hear Master Ning comment on several people’s skill — this old man didn’t fully understand it at the time, but thinking back now, it truly carried the air of a proper grandmaster. Given his exalted status, he couldn’t very well come here himself — but I recall that, back when he first became acquainted with Chancellor Qin, he was indeed already quite famous in the jianghu… And also, that Madam Liu — nominally, is she not the actual commander of the 29th Army in Miaojiang?”

Reasoning this far, he came away with a much deeper understanding of Master Ning of the southwest. Of course — the man had, before the regicide at the Golden Hall, put down the Yongle rebellion, helped Chancellor Qin’s secret bureau suppress the green forest, and achieved great things in wiping out the Liangshan bandits — all of this had, of course, reflected his standing in the jianghu; only after the regicide had it become inconvenient to publicize such minor jianghu fame. And so, being the faction with the strongest grip on public discourse, it made sense that talk of Master Ning’s martial prowess had, over the years, remained so vague — some said it was real, some said it was exaggerated, and no one could quite tell.

But if that weren’t the case, how could that Madam Liu — said to be even mightier than Chen Fan — ever have been kept in check? Surely even a formidable inner demon like Ning Yi would otherwise find his household authority somewhat undermined.

As for this sort of matter — the private affairs of great men, so to speak — the old Confucian scholar found it endlessly delightful to chew over in his mind, but it wasn’t the sort of thing to bring up in front of a young girl. Zuo Xiuquan nodded, savoring the thought privately, while beside him Xiao Qi furrowed her brow in concentration, scratching her head with a finger, sensing that something wasn’t quite right — but in the end, she said nothing more.

Back home, though Sister Xigua always claimed to be the fiercest fighter in the family, her brother-in-law and the others generally treated her more with indulgent deference. If it really came down to a contest of skill, might it be that… her brother-in-law was, in fact, the stronger one… after all?

At this point, both of them fell silent, each harboring thoughts they couldn’t quite voice aloud. Zuo Xiuquan, applying his fastidious scholarly instincts to the matter, found Ning Yi’s past endlessly fascinating and resolved to discuss it further with Zuo Wenhuai and the other juniors once he returned to Fujian; Xiao Qi, for her part, remained uncertain of just how skilled her brother-in-law truly was — but out in public, she always had to talk him up, to insist he was the world’s number one, all while privately holding this belief and waiting for the moment when the enemy’s morale on the battlefield would finally break.

Once the enemy’s spirit collapsed, the snipers on the field would finally have room to work, and could pin down Lin Zongwu, still locked in combat with Chen Fan — and then, given even the slightest opening, this so-called world’s foremost fighter would be reduced to a heap of mangled flesh.

It was at that very moment that things changed once more.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH—”

Lin Zongwu’s roar rang out over the battlefield. Unlike his booming, grandiose cry at the very start, or the fierce, heroic sounds of his fighting afterward, this cry now seemed to carry within it an endless sorrow — and within that sorrow, a bloodthirsty killing intent.

The battlefield was a mess of chaos; scanning across it with their binoculars from up here, some areas were visible, but far more lay hidden from view. The two on the rooftop froze for a moment.

“What’s happened…”

…

Rewinding a little further.

Lin Zongwu’s mind had reached a state of perfect harmony, and after a single, complete cry of “Amitabha,” he had thrown himself into direct combat with Chen Fan.

Morale among the fighters on the battlefield soared; “Avici Butcher” blade-chief Peng Tiangang directed his men into the largest assault yet, hoping to wipe out the mere several dozen Huaxia Army soldiers before them in coordination with Lin Zongwu, before the Overlord Blade forces could arrive from the east.

Wang Nantuo, too, had taken his senior brother’s conviction to heart, and after crying out “Maitreya has descended, his light shines everywhere,” the masters he had personally raised within the Great Brightness Sect over the years launched their most ferocious assault yet.

Just as Xiao Qi and Zuo Xiuquan had discussed from afar, however much these green-forest fighters were derided as a disorganized rabble, in the early stages, when they still felt they had the numbers, people would always make at least one determined, valiant attempt.

Lin Zongwu and Chen Fan’s fight burst out of the shop, through the courtyard, and into a nearby residence. Chen Fan, with his natural strength, was in the prime of his fighting years — and yet Lin Zongwu’s punches came wave after relentless wave, driven by an overwhelming inner power, and even Chen Fan had begun to show faint signs of strain.

Off to the side of the battlefield, Ning Ji, clutching his rifle, ran through the rubble in a wretched state, blood seeping from more than a few places on his body. After Lin Zongwu burst out into the open, he’d tried to line up a shot twice, but hadn’t found the chance; meanwhile, Wang Nantuo, broadsword in hand, kept up a relentless pursuit from behind, coming close several times to cornering him.

Once renowned as “Mad Tiger,” Wang Nantuo, in his prime, had come close to ranking among the very top tier of jianghu masters. During the great battle to hunt down Fang Qifo, he had, at just over twenty years of age, been able to match — and even, faintly, outmatch — Chen Fan, then at the peak of his physical strength but still lacking in experience.

But the unforeseen disaster at the city of Wozhou, facing off against the master named Lin Chong, had very nearly cost him his life.

Facing that fatal spear thrust Lin Chong had unleashed, Lin Zongwu had stepped in front and saved his life — but the spear that struck instead had crippled one of his arms. From that point on, however diligently he trained, his skill had, at best, only ever managed to touch the edge of the second tier. From then on, he had changed his approach, devoting himself to propping up the Great Brightness Sect’s hollowed-out southern branch on behalf of his disheartened senior brother — and, having adopted a more humble, accommodating manner, had actually earned the respect of a good many in the green forest, right up until Xu Zhaonan’s rise, for which he could take some credit in having found the sect a path forward.

But in this moment, throwing everything he had into the fight and still unable to catch this little punk of the Huaxia Army left him feeling a fresh wave of frustration at the plain fact of his diminished strength.

Whatever the case, once combat had broken out with the Huaxia Army, immediately entangling or killing the rifle-bearing snipers had, from long habit born of a persistent sense of crisis, remained a firm conclusion of his — and so he pursued relentlessly, determined not to let this Huaxia Army gunman find any chance to take aim at his senior brother.

In the deep-autumn sunlight, Ning Ji, thoroughly disheveled, had dust and blood blooming across his torn clothes; on the other side, the Mad Tiger, despite his best efforts to tie back his long hair, couldn’t hide the streaks of gray mixed into the black. He pursued with roars and slashing blows, his voice already carrying a faint rasp — after being gravely wounded once before, his body had, from that point on, been on a downward slope.

The steel blade in his hand could still shatter wood and stone, and any ordinary civilian, faced with his hulking frame and his rage-bristled beard and hair, would still have been cut down without effort — but for a battle-hardened veteran like Ning Ji, this kind of chase no longer carried much of a sense of true, life-and-death urgency.

Of course, being pursued by a real master was still enough to trouble him — his own skill wasn’t yet high enough to easily dispatch the man and then go deal with Lin Zongwu on top of that…

The young monk Ping An, too, was weaving through the chaos of the battlefield.

He had run back the whole way; the fighting had already reached a white-hot intensity, and neither the Great Brightness Sect, the Huaxia Army, nor Peng Tiangang’s fighters had any inclination to treat him as one of their own — so he moved cautiously, dodging every pocket of combat, struggling to make his way toward where his master and “Big Brother” were fighting.

The clash between his master and the Huaxia Army’s great master had already begun. He had thought of trying to mediate, of calling on his master to abandon this duel — but he had no idea how to even begin, and even the site of two grandmasters locked in combat was hard enough for him to force his way into.

At one point, he climbed up onto a nearby eave.

Not far off in his line of sight, “Big Brother,” shouldering his long rifle, tumbled down through a stretch of rubble. As he stood up, his foot caught on a wooden stick, and his body pitched forward, sliding ahead — behind him, a hulking giant of a man swung his steel blade down.

Ping An opened his mouth.

Right before his eyes, the rifle slung over “Big Brother’s” shoulder swept across the hulking man’s face.

Crack—

The hulking man’s body, in the midst of lunging forward, suddenly convulsed; his head snapped back, and his entire frame hung suspended in the air for a single breath, red and white matter bursting into the sky behind him.

“Mad Tiger” Wang Nantuo — vanished from this world, in that very instant.

Never to be seen again.

…

Ning Ji, clutching his rifle, scooped up a handful of dirt from the ground; he rolled twice across the stone-strewn earth and got to his feet. The master who’d been chasing him had fallen behind him, rolled twice himself, his skull cracked open by the bullet.

A moment’s breather, at last.

He ran forward, beginning to reload his rifle, when, not far off in his line of sight, he saw someone watching him.

He looked over — it was his junior brother, Wu Kong, crouched low, running toward him.

Ning Ji’s heart lifted; without thinking twice, still in the middle of reloading, he pointed ahead toward where Lin Zongwu was. “Perfect timing — you and I can—”

The distance closed.

“Waaaaaaah—”

The young monk cried out, ferocity mixed with a sob in his voice.

Ning Ji’s head snapped around.

Blade-light came flashing straight at his face.

Blood — bloomed.