On the eighth day of the sixth month, through the long passage of a night that seemed to have no end, points of light scattered and gathered across the mountains around Dulong Ridge, on and on through the darkness.

The hunt for the routed Liangshan troops went on through the entire night. Now and then, screams still drifted through the night air — shrill and terrible. In this battle, the dead and wounded at Dulong Ridge were beyond counting, and for those household men whose families had already been lost, nothing done to these Liangshan men now would seem out of the ordinary. Though Ning Yi had already had a word with Elder Zhu and the others earlier, asking them to spare at least some prisoners, he had no wish to interfere with this kind of venting.

Most of the prisoners taken in this battle were still being held under guard by the Wurui Battalion’s men. Ning Yi went and made an appearance, then completed the handover and made arrangements for what was to follow — a new round of interrogation soon began at the camp. This time, the prisoners taken numbered over fifteen hundred; among them, more than five hundred had already been captured once before and released back to the Liangshan camp, only to be entirely intercepted by the Wurui Battalion after Wu Yong had them redeployed elsewhere.

In this round of interrogation, the proportion of men killed was even higher than in the previous rounds, and the focus of the interrogation records was each man’s native place, name, and family circumstances. Whenever a genuine die-hard was found, quite a few of them were dragged out and killed on the spot as a warning to the rest.

Sorting through and interrogating more than fifteen hundred men was bound to be a long process, though fortunately this time they had more hands available than before. Once things were arranged, Ning Yi got some time to rest. In the dark of the night he climbed the hillside and sat on a large rock there, watching the scattered points of light in the darkness.

Outside the camp, the Wurui Battalion was still hunting down prisoners across the area; over at Dulong Ridge, the moving lights carried little sense of joy either. Rounding up prisoners was one thing, but for the Zhu and Hu estates, the greater task was likely still tending the wounded and taking count of the dead. Passing through there now would surely mean nothing but weeping on every side. Su Wenyu had also gone that same night to nearby towns to gather the doctors he had already arranged for in advance, though they likely wouldn’t make it back before dawn. In this one night alone, who could say how much parting and reunion, sorrow and joy, had taken place. Meanwhile, the reckoning against the Li family was also underway through the night — many people would die before this night was through.

When Wang Shanyue came up the slope, he heard the man sitting on the rock humming a tune, the melody slow, the lyrics strange, yet carrying a peculiarly cold and clear feeling on the wind.

Wang Shanyue walked up to one side of the rock. “What is that nonsense you’re humming?”

Ning Yi glanced at him, still humming to himself, gazing down at everything below the hill; there was still a trace of cold severity in his expression, though his words, when they came, were somewhat gentler. “You’ve washed all that blood off yourself.”

“Hu Cheng is still gravely wounded; Old Master Hu is doing a little better. I went to check on them just now.” Wang Shanyue’s temperament was, generally speaking, also cold and severe, but over their time together Ning Yi had come to notice that toward his own people, his sense of loyalty ran quite deep — over these past days he had come to regard the Hu Family Estate as comrades in arms, and so he’d gone to look in on them. That gentleness at his core stood in almost complete contrast to the madness he displayed in battle — two utterly different extremes — no wonder Qin Siyuan had said his temperament ran to extremes.

Wang Shanyue sat down on the grass nearby, then lay back with a sigh, looking up at the starlight. “I believe now — that you really can bring Liangshan down.”

Ning Yi smiled faintly. “And I now know — that you really do eat people.” In the fighting during their breakout that day, Ning Yi had finally truly witnessed that mad side of Wang Shanyue. One of the Liangshan chieftains who had tried to ambush him should, by rights, have had far superior skill — yet after only a few exchanges, Wang Shanyue had lunged in and bitten off the man’s ear, nearly tearing half his face off besides. Liangshan’s ranks were already breaking apart in spirit at that point, and the sight had nearly frightened them witless before he was cut down. Throughout that entire pursuit, Wang Shanyue alone had ended up soaked in blood from head to toe — it seemed he’d even meant to use the chance to hone his skills further, which was, frankly, deranged.

Ning Yi paused. “Does human flesh taste good?”

“Raw, it’s gamey — what’s good about it?” Wang Shanyue’s answer was flat. “But after enough times, you get used to it, more or less. It doesn’t turn your stomach so much anymore.”

“Why do you do it — can you tell me?”

Until now the two of them had mostly kept things businesslike, though with Qin Siyuan connecting them, their relationship wasn’t a bad one. Wang Shanyue was, at heart, perhaps a fairly good-natured man; after what had happened at the Zhu Family Estate, with the bond of having fought as comrades now between them, Ning Yi felt he could ask the question freely. Wang Shanyue spread his hands open and looked up at the sky.

“It’s nothing much really,” he said. “My family’s situation — before you came, did your teacher tell you?”

“Mm. The Wang family… what happened before the Black Water Alliance…”

“From that point on, the Wang family had nothing left but women.” Wang Shanyue’s voice was clear and even, and there was a certain coldness to it — though it wasn’t directed at Ning Yi. “I’m the last grandson the Wang family has left. Being a man, I ought to protect the women of my family, don’t you think that’s right?”

“That’s how it should be, in principle,” Ning Yi nodded. “Doing it is another matter — not easy at all.”

At that, Wang Shanyue smiled, clearly pleased by what Ning Yi had said. He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone had lightened.

“After my family went to the capital… I kept thinking that way the whole time. Back then I studied both letters and martial arts, but honestly, I put more weight on the martial side, because I wasn’t much good at it, and someone needed to be the one who could actually fight if we were to hold the family together — otherwise, if my sisters were bullied outside, I’d have no way to stand up for them… The capital is a place where some people show restraint, but there are plenty of others who won’t spare you any pity just because your family’s been through misfortune. In truth, even that pity, back then, was something I wanted — I’ve never had a strong temperament, not since I was small.”

This was, perhaps, one of the less glorious episodes of his life, but he spoke of it now with a certain equanimity: “Because of that, I’d get bullied sometimes. Whether it was letters or martial arts, that sort of thing was always hard to avoid. And besides… the ones left in our family were all women, and sometimes people would make jokes about that. I couldn’t stand it, so I’d fight them — and mostly, I’d get beaten. My constitution was never good either, even as a child, and however hard I tried, I couldn’t beat boys my age who were physically stronger. That went on, until one day, when my sister was bullied while out playing, and I went to fight — I grabbed hold of someone and bit him…”

He laughed. “It really was that simple. You bite someone, and he’ll call you a savage, but the next time he sees you, he’ll take a step back. But that wasn’t enough on its own — I still got beaten afterward. Biting alone doesn’t make people afraid of you, not by itself. So one time, when they came at me again, I bit off a man’s finger and chewed it up right in front of them all… After that, I understood — if I wanted to hold up the Wang family and protect the people around me, there was no other way. In this world, the wicked are all like tigers… A man doesn’t taste good, but as long as it makes them afraid, no matter how vile it is, I’ll eat it… Heh — because of that, since coming to Shandong, I’ve actually beaten quite a few skilled fighters…”

The echo of his laughter lingered in the air, tinged with a genuinely cold sorrow. Ning Yi blinked, and the two of them sat in silence for a good while. He braced his hands on the rock behind him and quietly began to hum again. In truth, that Wang Shanyue could say all this so plainly to one of his own showed that, at his core, he remained an exceedingly gentle person — as for how much inner turmoil lay behind it, even unspoken, Ning Yi could well enough imagine.

“Hey, did you know? My own skill in combat isn’t very high either.”

“I know.”

“But I have a lot of special techniques, and plenty of skilled fighters have died at my hands. Maybe we could trade notes with each other sometime.”

“…” Wang Shanyue looked over, silent for a moment, then finally said, “…Thanks.” The gratitude was sincere. After a moment he laughed. “You teach me your special moves, and… I’ll teach you how to eat people.”

“Er… alright.” Ning Yi blinked, then nodded.

In the night, up on the hillside, the two of them broke into hearty laughter together.

The long night at last drew to its end, and then came the daylight of the ninth. The Wurui Battalion’s interrogations, and all the various matters of aftermath at Dulong Ridge, continued on. Su Wenyu had brought in a large number of doctors from the nearby towns, tending promptly to the wounded on all sides. As Ning Yi and the others oversaw these matters, they were also sorting through the mass of intelligence steadily emerging from the more than fifteen hundred prisoners, preparing to pick out several hundred die-hards to hand over to the Wurui Battalion as their share of the credit.

That afternoon, the first batch of valuables had already been sorted out at the Li Family Estate, for Ning Yi to bring to He Rui to smooth things over. In truth, Ning Yi had connections higher up, and the battle the day before hadn’t exactly been the Wurui Battalion’s finest hour either — having already come away with a fair sum of money and credit, He Rui hadn’t really expected anything more regarding the Li Family Estate. Yet here Ning Yi was, sending him this on top of it all, leaving He Rui grateful and, with a touch of guilt, willing to lay his cards on the table for Ning Yi.

“…Mr. Ning, rest assured — truth be told, if we truly mobilized, the Wurui Battalion isn’t incapable of fighting. It’s just that we’d suffered a defeat before, and yesterday’s battle came with no preparation at all — the enemy had the numbers, so everyone was mostly just looking out for themselves. With what’s happened this time, as long as I go back and smooth things over properly, I can promise you, Mr. Ning — given Liangshan’s current state, we can beat them without a problem.”

In truth, in yesterday’s engagement, though the Wurui Battalion’s six thousand men had had their center broken through, the defense on both flanks had held together well enough, and losses in the end hadn’t been especially heavy — Ning Yi had seen as much for himself. He patted He Rui’s hand and said earnestly, “Then I’ll leave it all to Commander He. In truth, I’ve never once doubted that our imperial army can’t fight — it certainly can.”

That night fell, and things went on busily right through to dawn of the next day. Ning Yi handed He Rui a list. The three hundred names on it were the most hopeless die-hards among the prisoners, meant for He Rui to take as his credit. He Rui immediately dispatched troops to sort these three hundred-odd men out. As for the rest, they were gathered in a valley near Dulong Ridge; with over two hundred more killed during interrogation, what remained numbered roughly a thousand.

Zheng Biao counted as the greatest prize of merit among those three hundred — he was one of Fang La’s generals, who had been broken out of prison and had ended up here. As he was dragged off wearing a wooden cangue, he caught sight of Ning Yi passing not far away, froze for a moment, then began struggling with all his strength, letting out a great roar: “Ning Liheng — Ning Liheng — it’s you! It’s you! I will kill you! Do you hear me! I will kill you—”

His outburst stirred up a commotion among the prisoners for a moment. Ning Yi glanced over, narrowed his eyes and thought a moment — it was deep night, and though there were torches nearby, it was still hard to see clearly. When someone leaned in and murmured beside his ear, he nodded. “Oh, Zheng Biao, is it…”

Hearing him say that so flatly, Zheng Biao froze for a moment as Ning Yi simply walked off. He was stunned, then shouted again: “I will kill you! I will kill you…” The sound echoed through the night sky as he was beaten and dragged off further and further away.

Ning Yi walked into the enclosed square in the valley, where over a thousand prisoners had been gathered. Hearing Zheng Biao’s shouting, some of them were still uneasy and uncertain, but once Ning Yi stepped up onto the wooden platform at the front and swept his cold gaze across them, silence fell all around. Among them, at least five hundred had been captured before and recognized his face.

“I ran into an old acquaintance — I killed his master back in Hangzhou. No need to make anything of it.” Torches ringed the area, with guards posted all around; Ning Yi set his hat, his bracelet, and a thick stack of records with everyone’s information down on the table on the platform. Not a sound stirred among the crowd. “Many of you have already seen me before. Thunderbolt Hand Lei Feng of the Mixed Origin — my real name is Ning Liheng. Whether you know it or not doesn’t matter. Rest assured — tonight, I have no more wish to kill. All of you will be released before dawn… This is the last time you’ll be let go. Before that, I only want to tell you all a story…”

The murmured whispering rose again around him. Ning Yi stood by the table and slammed his fist down on the wooden surface with a bang. At once, silence fell once more. Ning Yi stood there, sweeping his gaze across the entire little square, carrying about him an air of quiet authority that needed no anger to command respect — the atmosphere over half the ground had grown almost suffocating. After a long while, Ning Yi finally turned, pulled the chair from behind the table, and sat, his eyes cold.

“This may be…” Bang! The chair struck the platform. “…the last connection between me and many of us here…”