In the hazy darkness of night, firelight lit up the sky. The small county town had fallen into a scene of slaughter and chaos.
The reason this little county of Taoting had been chosen as a gathering place for men of the martial underworld was that it had never been a particularly upstanding place to begin with. All manner of people from every walk of life passed through the county seat, and its residents had long grown used to the occasional disturbance. But tonight, the government troops that had arrived were plainly no small matter. Zhou Tong and Fulu got off their horses and crept in on foot, and along the way they glimpsed three or four separate clashes underway — some breaking out from dark alleyways, others hidden away in private homes where the occupants, once discovered, rose up to fight back. Searching and fighting their way through the town were not only officers in constable and soldier’s uniforms, but even more numerous were bands of five to seven martial artists at a time.
These men did not wear proper government uniforms, but their coordination with the soldiers made clear that arrangements had already been made beforehand. With the soldiers’ backing, they were able to enter private homes to search them; the residents, sensing that something serious was afoot, stayed quietly hidden indoors and cooperated readily with the search. Zhou Tong and Fulu watched as several men of the martial underworld crept toward one house. They clearly knew the owner and wanted to hide inside, but the owner barred the wooden door from within, saying only, “Go, quickly! Go, don’t drag me into this!”
The men outside the door cursed him for having no sense of loyalty, and one of them threatened, “Open the door or we’ll burn your house down.” But just then, the sound of fighting spread over from the street, and the men fled at once.
The further they went, the closer to the center of town, the more clearly they could make out the firelight ahead. Zhou Tong had been to Taoting before and knew that at the center of the county seat stood a sizable inn and theater, the very gathering place for people of every stripe — the Heroes’ Gathering tonight would certainly have been held there. But now, that whole building had become a sea of fire, entirely burned down and collapsed, a faint smell of char hanging in the air — clearly no small number of people had perished in those flames.
Zhou Tong already had a rough guess as to what had happened here. Past the center of town, he made his way south.
The organizer of this gathering of the martial underworld was a man named Yan Huan, once a nominal disciple of Zhou Tong’s, himself a native of Taoting and fairly well known in the martial world. Zhou Tong had originally meant to go find him at the Yan family estate. But along the way, what truly caught Zhou Tong’s attention was the way these hunters operated — it struck him as oddly familiar.
These bands of five to seven fighters bore the brunt of the search-and-capture work. The reason to set them apart from ordinary men of the martial underworld was that the latter tended to be loose and undisciplined in their methods — even among those who had worked together a long time, there might be good coordination, but rarely much real method to it. These men, by contrast, had plainly been trained; in action, their coordination functioned almost as a single body — even if it fell short of perfection, it was clearly aimed in that direction.
The weapons they carried varied — some used fishing nets, some carried long spears, some wielded broadswords, some were armed with crossbows, some fought with saber and shield — a combination of saber and shield being, in the martial world at least, an unusual sight. Any single group like this might not seem like much at first glance, but watching several of them in action revealed real method behind it. These men’s individual skill might not reach the first rank, but coordinated well, once they engaged, a shield would block an incoming attack while two spears thrust in, a broadsword swung down, and a crossbow — devastating at close to medium range — combined with the threat of a thrown net. Ordinary bands of three to five underworld fighters were simply no match for them, often broken and captured after only a few exchanges.
And for Zhou Tong in particular, there was something else he could sense even more keenly.
Some ten-odd years earlier, while he still taught at the Imperial Boxing Hall, he had once considered how advanced martial arts might be applied to military formations — though he had made no further progress after reaching the rank of Chief Instructor there, Zhou Tong had still remained enthusiastic about such matters, and even though spreading boxing techniques widely went against the taboos of the martial world, he had never much cared.
He had spent a great deal of thought on these things back then. Simplifying forms in pursuit of quick mastery, or simplifying movements in pursuit of practical effect, or else designing special formations to be of greater use on the battlefield. But most of these attempts had eventually failed. What had been passed down by the ancestors had its own logic — boxing and martial skill required both innate talent and, first, having enough to eat. Even in the army, teaching without discrimination, only a few could ever truly master such arts to graduation — and that alone would have been tolerable, but the greater problem was that poor or incomplete teaching could actually injure the student’s body instead.
This was much the same flaw found in any attempt at rapid mastery — even a deep, advanced internal art like “Breaking the Six Paths” would leave hidden injuries behind. To mitigate this, one needed a martial artist of even higher skill to periodically clear the meridians and massage the body of the student — in the end, the cost of raising up one minor master ended up requiring a great master to look after him, a thoroughly poor bargain.
And even among those who truly did master advanced martial arts, the numbers were never large, and they tended to eat enormous amounts of food. An army made up of such men, however skilled and well-coordinated, would first and foremost bankrupt the state feeding them.
As for simplifying techniques — the training methods already used in the army, honed through endless real battlefield experience, already amounted to an extremely simplified art of killing. A single blade, a handful of moves repeated over and over, aimed always at the simplest, clearest vital points; according to the military manuals, soldiers already drilled simple chops, slashes, and thrusts hundreds or thousands of times a day. In terms of simplification, there was truly nothing left for Zhou Tong to simplify.
For all these various reasons, Zhou Tong had eventually come to realize that most of his ideas amounted to empty talk. As a martial artist, his mastery over his own body had reached its very peak — but as a military commander, he would in truth have been outmatched even by minor generals with far less martial skill. In the end, Zhou Tong had written down some of his thinking on the matter; the manuscripts had later been kept at the Imperial Boxing Hall, seen by very few.
And now, before his eyes, this formation of five to seven men bore a striking resemblance to the small battlefield formations he had once designed — though there were plenty of variations, the footwork, positioning, and the tricks of advancing and retreating in coordination clearly bore traces of his original concept.
Zhou Tong’s original idea had been to devise a formation that would allow soldiers, once cut off and surrounded on the battlefield, to fight on in small independent bands, struggling for survival in tight clusters. With his mastery of martial arts, he had worked out rather elegant coordination between a handful of men — if properly drilled and in perfect sync, a rhythm of block-kill, block-kill could let a few men hold off a steady stream of enemies quite effectively. But this, too, had remained mere fantasy in the end — daily training in the army was naturally conducted with the whole force together; there was no way to spend all day drilling the coordination of just a few men. And even if they had trained this way, once scattered on the battlefield, whoever regrouped together would be strangers to one another — this kind of formation, requiring such clearly defined mutual roles, was in practice of little real use.
Yet the men before him now had plainly adopted the advance-and-retreat footwork from his formation. At first glance, though each man’s weapon differed and the formation looked somewhat disorderly, traps lay everywhere within it. The man walking out front, seemingly careless, would fall back the instant he was attacked, at which point the shield would block, the broadsword would swing, the spears would seal off the retreat, and the crossbow’s threat combined with the feint of a thrown net — even a first-rate master, caught off guard, would suffer for it. Watching just a few of these clashes, Zhou Tong saw two underworld fighters brought down, trapped in that impossible bind between advance and retreat. A formation useless on an open battlefield had here become a sharp weapon for small-scale combat.
Zhou Tong had not originally designed for so many different weapons working in coordination, and as he watched, he found himself turning the idea over again in his mind. Before they had even reached the Yan family estate, master and servant suddenly spotted the very man they were looking for — a martial artist in his forties, moving with a small team of hunters down the far end of the long street. He knocked on the door of one household and told them he needed to come in and search; the family let him past without objection.
Zhou Tong and Fulu watched, puzzled. Yan Huan had earned his reputation in the martial underworld precisely for his generous, righteous spirit — and now, with the Heroes’ Gathering having come to this, was he really cooperating with the authorities? Though Zhou Tong himself had always stood on the side of the government, even he found this hard to understand. After tonight, would the Yan family estate still be able to hold its place in the martial world at all?
Having watched for a while in the shadows, Zhou Tong stepped out onto the street and called out in a low, resonant voice: “Yan Huan.” The men were just then coming out of the courtyard. Yan Huan’s body jolted; he looked over toward the voice, eyes wide, his hand trembling visibly. The hunter beside him, however, instantly fell into formation — the man who seemed to be the squad leader was just about to shout “Seize him,” when he heard Yan Huan say instead, “M-Master!”
“You…”
“Ah—”
In the next instant, Yan Huan gritted his teeth and suddenly lashed out, striking a palm blow at the squad leader. The man reacted just in time, raising an arm to block, though he was knocked back two steps by the force of it. The others were about to move against Yan Huan when the leader shouted, “Fall back! Don’t attack! It’s ‘Iron Arm’ Zhou Tong!”
At that name, everyone holding blades and spears turned to look this way, instinctively stepping back a pace or two, and just as instinctively falling into a small defensive formation. Yan Huan looked at them, took a few steps aside, then walked forward toward Zhou Tong. This martial-world man in his forties had tears glinting in his eyes. “M-Master… your disciple has sinned.” With that, he dropped to his knees right there in the street, pressing his forehead to the ground, and did not rise for a long while.
Zhou Tong frowned, utterly unable to make sense of what he was seeing. He could only step forward and pull Yan Huan up by the arm. “There’s no need for this. You and I may address each other as master and disciple, but in truth I never taught you a thing… What has happened here?”
“They…” Yan Huan pointed back behind him, teeth gritted. “They… seized all thirty-nine members of my family, and threatened me into turning this Heroes’ Gathering into a death trap. I… my eldest son has already been killed by them… Master.”
Zhou Tong fell silent. He could see that the tears in Yan Huan’s eyes were not for his son’s death, but from guilt at having betrayed so many others. After a moment, the squad leader spoke up first. “Elder Zhou, my master has spoken of you before. Surely you haven’t come here to ‘gather in righteous cause’ with these men, have you?”
The man’s words rang out firm and unyielding, plainly without a shred of guilt over what was happening. Zhou Tong glanced at him and cupped his hands. “Your master — would that be Ning Liheng?”
“That is the man!” Yan Huan said, biting off each word, his eyes bloodshot. Having said this, he suddenly stepped back. “Master, all thirty-nine members of my family remain in that demon’s hands. I, Yan Huan, was coerced by another and took this false step — I can no longer face the world. I will go first!” With these words, he swung a palm toward the crown of his own head. Before the blow could land, Fulu stepped forward and struck his arm, deflecting the force, then seized his hand.
Zhou Tong’s gaze turned stern as he swept it over him. “A man stands upright between heaven and earth — do not ape such womanish theatrics. I have met Ning Liheng once before. Come, let us go see him.” Yet there was little to read of his true feelings in his tone.
The squad leader cupped his hands and led the group toward the northeast of the town. Along the way, they came across another band that had just captured two underworld men — one of them dragged along in a fishing net, howling under a beating with sticks, already beginning to beg for mercy. Seeing this, Zhou Tong frowned and turned his head slightly aside.
As they walked, Zhou Tong learned from Yan Huan what had happened that night. The truth of it was simple enough. The Heroes’ Gathering of the martial underworld had indeed been held at the inn in the center of town. The other side had taken Yan Huan’s family hostage and had oil and gunpowder prepared within the venue. Halfway through the gathering, the demon had appeared, made a brief showing before the crowd, and then they had surrounded the venue and set it ablaze. In that critical instant, some of the underworld men, realizing what was happening, had fought desperately to escape; the great majority had been blown apart or burned to death. What was being hunted down now was only the small remainder who had managed to flee.
As Yan Huan finished telling this, his eyes were bloodshot. Zhou Tong only listened in silence, saying nothing. After a moment, he spoke to the squad leader walking ahead. “You’re Tian Donghan, if I’m not mistaken — I saw you once at the foot of Mount Tai.”
The man turned back, somewhat startled, then cupped his hands and nodded. “I glimpsed you from a distance five years ago, Elder — I never expected you would still remember.”
“Your master brought you along to see the world; he said you had inherited his skills, though he worried your honesty might get you taken advantage of one day — that you’d end up working as a household guard and still take the beating meant for some landlord’s son… Your master passed three years ago. I thought of him then, that he had a disciple like you.” Zhou Tong said, “Why do you work for Ning Yi?”
Tian Donghan thought for a moment, walking on, and said in a low voice, “Last year’s famine — my family had no money to buy grain. My… my mother fell ill and later starved to death, and my wife died too. I brought my two children along, begging and performing tricks the whole way to the capital, and there I came across Master Ning’s household handing out porridge and hiring household guards, so I signed on.”
Zhou Tong nodded, and after a moment asked again, “Why did you kill his son?”
Tian Donghan, walking ahead, tilted his head slightly. “I don’t know all the details, but since I joined the Ning household last year, my master has been running about tirelessly for famine relief, and has made enemies for it. Over the past few months, thirteen separate bands have come to assassinate him. Half a month ago, my master took two new wives, and they came bursting in to make trouble again — his son killed a guard and a maid before fleeing, claiming to be acting in righteousness on Heaven’s behalf. This Yan fellow even held a celebration over it. When my master came, he wanted to force him into submission, but had no wish to let him bargain using his son’s own life — so he had the boy’s head cut off right in front of him first, and only then used the lives of his whole family to threaten him.”
Having said this, Tian Donghan paused a moment. “I know this wasn’t quite right, but I imagine… there was no other way.”
Yan Huan clenched his fists, his whole body trembling, nearly ready to rush forward. Zhou Tong only walked on, saying nothing more.