In the morning light over the wilderness, birdsong rang out clear and melodious; the mountain wind carried a slight chill as it blew, gradually warming as the sun climbed higher.
Ning Yi and Hongti walked through the mountain wilds, with Hongti occasionally climbing to higher ground to survey their surroundings, then telling Ning Yi stories from her travels through the outlaw world with her master, along with many things her master had taught her.
“…The highest vantage points usually offer the best views, but everyone knows that logic. So the best scouts are actually the most cautious about places like that. In wartime, when things get complicated, if a scout sneaks up to a spot like that and gets spotted by four or five people at once from all around, that can get rather interesting. I remember once at Lüliang Mountain, I ran into exactly that—a Liao scout strolled boldly up a hill to survey the surroundings, and I was watching from behind, hadn’t even made my move yet, when men from another stronghold beat me to it. They killed the scout and took his belongings…”
As Ning Yi saw it, or at least reasoned in theory, Monk Tunyun, Lin Chong, and the others were likely still somewhere nearby, and even in the midst of their flight, it wouldn’t do to let their guard down. The possibility of them suddenly striking remained ever-present, and Ning Yi stayed quite alert throughout the journey. Yet perhaps because Lu Hongti was herself an expert in this kind of thing, nothing of the sort actually happened along the way—clear proof that he himself wasn’t always destined for the “protagonist’s luck.”
Noticing Ning Yi’s watchfulness about their surroundings, Hongti shared with him some practical knowledge about traveling through the wilderness—where a wolf’s den might be, where a fox had passed through, where rabbits could be caught—the tall woman rattling it all off like second nature. Perhaps because their identities as teacher and student had now been settled, Hongti’s manner of speaking gradually shifted toward that of a “teacher,” taking on a bit more… authority.
At times Ning Yi could faintly glimpse the shadow of another woman within her, and from the scattered fragments she mentioned about her own teacher, he could piece together a picture of two figures—one grown, one small—walking together through the mountain wilds. Of course, perhaps having completed the psychological shift from friend to teacher in her own mind, Hongti now spoke a bit less often about her childhood.
Of course, after last night, to call the atmosphere between the two of them simply that of teacher and student now felt somewhat peculiar.
Ning Yi’s own natural bearing had never been one to defer easily to others, and even though Hongti now tried to carry herself with the demeanor of a “teacher,” the way they spoke and interacted didn’t change all that much—especially given that Hongti herself already believed that being able to “command ten thousand men” was the truly impressive thing. She spoke to him plainly and calmly about the rules of survival in the wilderness or on the battlefield, and Ning Yi listened humbly in turn. Yet in this exchange of speaking and listening, the roles of teacher and student never quite came through clearly.
That morning upon waking, Hongti went to a nearby stream and caught a fish. Ning Yi gutted it and sliced it into thin raw slices with a small knife, and the two shared it. In truth, there was still a bit of smoked meat left, but Hongti didn’t want any of it, so Ning Yi left it alone too. Eating raw fish was really just a matter of necessity, since they couldn’t safely light a fire, but Hongti was already quite used to eating raw food; still, tasting these thin, tender slices of fish was something of a novelty for her. Ning Yi only thought the fish wasn’t quite as delicate as salmon. There was a hedonistic streak in his nature, but also a practical one—let alone slicing fish like this, even if conditions were poor and he had to eat raw fowl if necessary, he wasn’t incapable of it.
Along the way, Hongti, walking ahead, would occasionally leap up and slash down wild fruit with her sword. But since it wasn’t yet deep autumn, most of the edible fruit was still sour and astringent—though eating it did help wash away the fishy taste lingering in their mouths. Ning Yi ate a few and kept some more on him. This day’s journey wound about, and the two didn’t plan to head to the nearby county town, instead finding a dry spot sheltered by a rock formation in the woods, not far from a small stream in the mountains, to rest. Hongti caught another fish, which Ning Yi killed and cleaned, then sliced into sashimi-style pieces on a rock lined with leaves. As he did this, the sun was setting behind the valley, and Hongti sat nearby on a rock, watching him slice the fish, as if playing house.
By this point the two of them had been fleeing their pursuers for a full day now, and it was hard to say whether they still needed to be quite this cautious. But as far as Ning Yi was concerned, though he wasn’t afraid to take risks, it was still better to avoid unnecessary ones when possible. By now, the follow-up force of two hundred men from Dulong Ridge should have already reached Anping, and by tomorrow, the Wurui Camp’s army would likely be moving into the area as well. At that point, whether it was the Liangshan remnants or that muddled alliance, the outlaw forces around Anping and Zhuxi would have no choice but to collapse—all Ning Yi needed to do now was wait.
That night was the fifteenth of the seventh month, with another great full moon overhead. The two returned to shelter beneath the rock, where Hongti had him lie face-down again and performed another session of channeling his meridians, circulating the qi and blood throughout his body to clear away the lingering risks from练破六道. Ning Yi, drenched in sweat from the ordeal, asked if he could go wash up by the stream nearby; Hongti went along with him, standing guard behind a large rock while he washed, then had him keep watch while she washed up as well. Ning Yi stood behind the rock, looking up at the moon in the sky, listening to the sound of the water behind him.
That night, the two of them talked idly about various things again. Deep into the night, Hongti sat down beneath the large rock, knees drawn up, hugging her bundle and sword to her chest. Ning Yi, having finished sorting through his things by the rock, at some point came over and sat down beside her, pressed close. Hongti’s shoulders drew in slightly at first, but when Ning Yi reached out and put his arm around her, she still naturally leaned into him—though perhaps “leaned into” wasn’t quite the right word; “relied on” might describe it better.
Just as the night before, Hongti tilted her body slightly, curling up as she settled against him. Outside, the moon hung round and full, and the mountain wind whistled through the gap beside the rock. When she occasionally opened her eyes, there was something complicated in Hongti’s gaze—they were… master and disciple now, after all. But before long, things fell quiet once more. And so, in that stillness, she rested against him, relying on him.
The next morning, Ning Yi woke first. The forest was still dark, with the sounds of animals occasionally passing nearby. The woman in his arms lay curled against his chest, still deep asleep within his embrace, her folded legs pressed against his. He could feel her steady, even breathing.
Looking back, he realized he didn’t have a particularly deep understanding of the woman in his arms. Aside from that first remark she’d made when they’d met—that she had “lived a life hardly fit for a human”—in their time together since, she had never said much about the conditions of life at Lüliang Mountain; even when she did bring it up, she kept mostly to objective facts, offering him information to help gauge the broader situation. Ning Yi had lived through darkness himself, and had tried his best to imagine the darkness of life at Lüliang as vividly as he could—but he also knew that, as a modern man, the darkness in his own mind and the reality of Lüliang were bound to be fundamentally different. No matter how he tried to imagine it, that gap would always remain.
Idioms like “exchanging children to eat” were, in later ages, at most just idioms. The concept of hunger, to modern people who had never truly gone hungry for many days at a stretch, was likewise just a simple concept. Death and degradation, cruelty and violence—these were mostly the same; none of it could truly make someone feel that gut-wrenching despair, that bone-chilling oppression.
At this moment, he found himself recalling the very first question the two of them had exchanged, back when they’d first agreed to their arrangement of mutual instruction.
“What is it you want…”
In the darkness, he murmured this quietly, but received no answer—perhaps because Hongti, still asleep, didn’t register his voice as a signal to wake.
That morning, the two set off again. Along the way, Hongti’s expression no longer carried the same natural ease of “teacher” that it had the day before—after all, Ning Yi had held her through another night of sleep. Though Hongti had grown up at Lüliang, the teachings of Liang Bingfu had instilled in her an understanding of the significance of heaven, earth, sovereign, kin, and teacher. Earlier, in order to shield Ning Yi from trouble, she had already openly declared before everyone that she was his teacher—if there were now anything unclear or improper between the two of them, then beyond the infamy of the “demonic menace,” there would be yet another pretext for others to target him, manipulating human nature and, worse, inverting the proper order of human relationships. She had no idea exactly how severe such condemnation might be down south, but it would surely not be small.
He had held her like that, and she hadn’t wanted to pull away—but thinking it over now, her mind fell into confusion. And… what had he been thinking, holding her like that?
As she mulled over these things, Ning Yi’s own mind was likewise filled with countless thoughts, and the two walked in relative silence along the way. By now they had already passed one county town, and by afternoon, as the outlines of buildings gradually appeared ahead, they decided to head toward the next town, Yiyuan County. It was only then that the pursuers they had been expecting finally appeared.
At a spot only one or two barren hills away from Yiyuan County town, Lu Hongti was the first to spot Lin Chong, Shi Jin, and the others’ figures along a mountain ridge. Shortly after, some sharp-eyed Liangshan elites among them seemed to spot her and Ning Yi as well. Without pausing to confirm further, Lu Hongti led Ning Yi running toward the other side of the mountains. After running for a while, someone came pursuing from the side as well; Lu Hongti frowned. “There are two of them… experts.”
She wasn’t afraid of facing a single challenger, but if two experts were closing in from different directions, it would inevitably pose a threat to Ning Yi. Running on like this, they burst out of the forest to find, ahead of them, an apparently abandoned village in the barren hills. Ning Yi, though running fast, knew his own pace was ultimately dragging the woman beside him down, and said, “If you need to turn back and fight, don’t worry about me—we’ll push toward the county town, I’m not entirely defenseless either.”
Running ahead, Hongti shook her head. “That’s not it… something’s off about them… wait.”
As she ran, she suddenly slowed her pace. They had by now reached a road at the edge of the abandoned village; Ning Yi, following a few steps behind her, watched as Hongti came to a stop, raising her left hand backward to block him. Ning Yi reached out and, instead, ended up holding her hand, and so they both stopped there, hand in hand. Hongti didn’t seem to think much of it at first, her brow furrowed as she stared at a figure standing at the fork in the road ahead, within the village.
It was an elderly man in a blue robe, appearing to be around fifty years old. Though sturdily built, his temples had already gone gray; he stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze calm and still. Ning Yi, skilled at reading people, could tell from this old man’s bearing that he had likely held some official post before—men like Chen Jinxia, for instance, carried a certain steadiness too, but the bearing of someone who had moved through officialdom was unmistakably different from that of outlaw commoners. For some reason, as the afternoon sunlight fell over them, Hongti gripped her sword before her chest, as if facing a formidable foe.
At that same moment, a voice came carrying from the distance: “Hahahaha, so my two days of waiting here weren’t wasted—you two shameless dogs really did come this way…” That arrogant tone was unmistakably Monk Tunyun’s; from the abandoned village, it seemed a good number of others were rushing over as well. As it turned out, when it came to chasing someone through mountains and forests, Lu Hongti might well be formidable, but when it came to knowledge of the local terrain, it was Monk Tunyun and Lu Wenhu who were the true locals. Having failed to find Ning Yi and the others, they had simply calculated a likely spot and waited there instead—and sure enough, the two had shown up.
Ning Yi glanced back and saw, from the forest behind them, a somewhat younger middle-aged man in a blue robe appear as well. He said quietly, “Looks like those two behind us deliberately drove us here…” Hongti shook her head, saying quietly, “No. He’s one of them—look at the top of his head…” Ning Yi looked closely and only then noticed that the old man standing there with hands clasped behind his back was, in fact, faintly giving off steam from the top of his head.
Ning Yi had no idea just how much his own slower pace had dragged Hongti down, but for someone to have driven the two of them here from behind and still arrived first to wait for them, the level of skill required was beyond his ability to gauge, and he suddenly felt uncertain in his heart. As he was thinking this over, the old man too was studying the two of them, glancing at their joined hands and frowning slightly. Then more than a dozen figures came rushing up from behind the abandoned village, led by Monk Tunyun, with Lu Wenhu, Han Li, and others alongside him, all wearing looks of amusement on their faces.
The more than a dozen men gathered around, facing the blue-robed old man’s back. Han Li sneered coldly. “Hah, so that’s why you stopped—turns out you were waiting for reinforcements…” He laughed a few times, then called out loudly, “Lin Chong! Shi Jin! Men of Liangshan—over here—” His voice carried out through the mountains.
As his shout finished ringing out, the old man’s brow furrowed. Ning Yi glanced around at the surrounding mountains but saw no sign of movement from the Liangshan men. Monk Tunyun was still advancing, when the old man spoke up. “Oh? If I were reinforcements, could you lot actually handle it?” His voice was deep and resonant, striking like a thunderclap. At these words, Lu Wenhu’s expression suddenly changed in the crowd. Monk Tunyun stepped forward, pushing out with one large hand beside the old man. “If not, then get out of the way!”
Monk Tunyun’s martial skill was formidable, ranking first among men like Lu Wenhu, and this one-handed push of his, though it looked casual and understated, actually carried tremendous force behind it. Engaging this suddenly-appeared old man was also, in part, a way of testing him out—given his own standing and seniority in the martial world, standing shoulder to shoulder with anyone wasn’t beneath him. But this time he had pushed against the wrong man. As his broad sleeve swept out with a whistling sound, the old man tilted his head slightly, and the first thing Monk Tunyun saw was that old man’s utterly fierce gaze—like the whiskers of a fierce tiger, provoking instant fury at the slightest touch.
As he pushed forward, the old man’s body shifted slightly along with that small tilt of his head, his shoulder narrowly avoiding the palm by the barest hair’s breadth, almost effortlessly—and then came the old man’s simple grip and punch.
One punch, driven forward.
Before the monk’s very eyes, that old man’s fist and its force came crashing forward like it would swallow heaven and earth whole—
And it was at this very moment that there appeared before them all someone that neither side had ever anticipated…