Through the darkness, figures and warhorses raced onward, cutting through a stretch of woods before emerging onto a somewhat more open stretch of hills. A worn dirt road wound down the slope ahead, leading toward a village in the distance that had become a ghost town.
The village had only recently been abandoned; though no one lived there now, it still showed few signs of the ravages of time. This place… was already close to Dengzhou. Bound and tied across the back of a horse, Yinping recognized it—she had passed through here once before, a little over a month ago, with soldiers of the Beiwei Army.
The wind rushed past her ears; from somewhere in the distance came the faint sound of commotion—a small skirmish currently underway. The bound girl on horseback held her breath; within their own group of riders, someone cast a watchful glance toward the darkness in that direction, and before long, the sounds of fighting stopped.
A man on horseback came riding in from the distance, torch in hand; drawing near, he reached down and untied two heads hanging from his belt, tossing them into the muddy ditch beside the road. Yinping closed her eyes, hearing the man say: “Two from the rivers and lakes.”
“A couple?” Someone seemed to glance into the ditch.
“A pair of dogs. Died together.”
From the horse behind her came a muffled, struggling sound, followed by a sharp slap, and then another sound after it. The man on that horse cursed: “You little brat!” It was likely Yue Yun struggling with all his might, earning himself another blow.
In the night wind, someone gave a scornful laugh, and the group of riders continued on ahead.
The village drew nearer, and Dengzhou drew nearer still.
The closer they got to Dengzhou, the smaller the chance grew that she and her brother would ever be rescued…
…
Probably no one could give a truly precise description of what war actually was. If one had to sum it up, the closest phrase might be “sparing nothing.” Since the dawn of humanity, whatever means or acts were possible at all had a chance of appearing in war. It had already been several years since the Wu dynasty fell into the flames of war.
Xiangyang, having changed hands again two months earlier, had just become the front line of this war. Now, between Xiangyang, Dengzhou, and Xinye, the region remained a chaotic, treacherous stretch of land.
The scattering of the original inhabitants, the gathering of refugees, and the fighting between the Beiwei Army, the puppet Qi’s forces, and the Jin army in this area had turned the several hundred li surrounding it into one great battlefield of chaos.
Before the main forces gathered for a full counteroffensive, the puppet Qi’s patrols focused their efforts on intercepting refugees—any fleeing civilians who had made it this far were, as far as they were concerned, to be killed on sight without exception. The Beiwei Army, meanwhile, sent out its own units, doing their best, amid the initial skirmishing, to bring refugees to safety.
The previous month, over a group of civilians, the puppet Qi’s army had attempted to set an ambush against the Beiwei Army; once Niu Gao and the others saw through the plan, they turned it around into a counter-ambush of their own, besieging the position and drawing in reinforcements to expand their gains. The puppet Qi’s reinforcements, together with a Jin supervisory unit, had then massacred civilians as a diversion, hoping to relieve the siege by threatening something else instead; this minor engagement had nearly escalated into something much larger before the Beiwei Army, having gained the upper hand, exercised restraint and withdrew—though by then, close to half the refugees involved had already been slaughtered.
Clashes of this kind had become common in recent days, but after nearly triggering a larger confrontation, both sides had, for the time being, maintained a cautious restraint in this area. The Beiwei Army, having just won a major victory, was busy consolidating the defenses on the other side and needed time to digest the lessons of that triumph and solidify the army’s confidence.
The puppet Qi’s forces were cowardly and reluctant to fight; they much preferred intercepting refugees heading south, killing them outright and seizing whatever last possessions they had. Under pressure from the Jin supervisory forces, however, they had no choice but to remain locked in this standoff.
As for the Jin side, having originally propped up the puppet Qi regime, they had once left several garrisons of their own within the Central Plains—but these were not elite troops; though a handful of the founding-era Jurchen strongmen remained among them, after years stationed in the Central Plains, with local officials falling over themselves to please them, no one had dared openly resist them, and these men, living lives of ease and comfort, had gradually let their fighting spirit erode. By the time they reached Dengzhou and Xinye, the Jin commanders had been urging the puppet Qi’s forces into battle, while the puppet Qi’s forces kept requesting reinforcements and stalling for time.
In broad terms, the three forces remained locked in this standoff, and in the gaps between confrontations, the slaughter of refugees showed no sign of letting up. On the advice of the staff advisor Sun Ge, the Beiwei Army had sent out patrols of three to five hundred men in rotating batches to escort those coming south from the north, and would occasionally come across, in the woods and open fields, the horrific aftermath of civilians who had been massacred and looted—the elderly and children killed outright, women raped and then killed… When these soldiers returned and spoke of what they’d seen, they could hardly wait to charge onto the battlefield themselves, to drink the enemy’s blood and eat their flesh. These soldiers, in turn, became all the more capable fighters for it.
Of course, within the ranks behind the Beiwei Army, different voices had also begun to stir because of all this. To guard against northern spies infiltrating the city, the Beiwei Army kept tight control over Xiangyang; most refugees were only allowed brief rest before being funneled onward to the south. Some southern scholars and officials, having inquired into the situation and picked up on a great deal, had also sharply noted that the Beiwei Army did not, in fact, currently have the capacity to press further north.
If the Beiwei Army had pushed north with a more resolute stance, rather than sending out only three or five hundred men at a time, perhaps the civilians who had died between Xiangyang, Dengzhou, and Xinye could have survived instead.
Of course, in the glow of the recent great victory, such voices of discontent had not yet become especially prominent. Yinping, only thirteen or fourteen years old, did not fully understand these matters either, but what she could understand was this: her father neither would nor could send the army out of Xiangyang simply to rescue the two of them, his children—nor could her father himself, at a time like this, set Xiangyang aside and come chasing after them personally from the rear. Once she’d grasped the strength of the group that had captured her and Yue Yun, Yinping had already sensed, deep down, that the chances of the two of them surviving this were slim indeed.
Two days earlier, in the city of Xiangyang, the scarred giant of a man had needed only three exchanges to knock down both her and Yue Yun; when she woke, they were already outside the city walls. Waiting for them was a group whose core numbered around forty or fifty, made up of both Jurchens and Han Chinese; having seized the two siblings, they had been circling around outside Xiangyang ever since.
Beyond this core of forty or fifty, there were evidently more hands still involved as well, judging from the occasional reports that came in. By now, the finest fighters of the Beiwei Army had already come pouring out of the city in pursuit, and the army was likely setting up a tight defensive perimeter too. The moment Yinping woke, her first instinct had been to calmly assess the situation before her—but after one encounter with a Beiwei Army scout patrol, she began to realize things were not going well at all.
The leader of this group was a Jurchen man in his thirties, commanding several dozen men who could very likely all be counted among the finest fighters in the martial world—the one with the highest skill among them was clearly that scarred giant who had infiltrated the city earlier. This man had a fierce, malevolent face and spoke little, yet even the Jurchen leader addressed him respectfully as “Master Lu.” Yinping had little experience in the martial world, but a name still surfaced faintly in her mind—a grandmaster-level figure who had once dominated the north: the “Fierce King of Hell,” Lu Tuo.
Back when the demon lord Ning Yi had headed the Secret Investigation Bureau, he had made a great effort to gather all manner of intelligence from across the martial world. After Ning Yi’s rebellion, the Secret Investigation Bureau had been broken apart, but a great deal of its material had still been quietly preserved by Princess Chengguo’s household, and later passed on to Crown Prince Jun Wu; as his trusted aides, Yue Fei and Wenren Buer had naturally been able to consult these records as well. In the course of building up the Beiwei Army, Yue Fei had also drawn in a good number of martial-world recruits, and Yinping, in going through those archived files, had come across the name Lu Tuo before.
Compared to great grandmasters like Fang La, Zhou Tong, and Lin Zongwu, the “Fierce King of Hell” Lu Tuo’s own skill was somewhat lesser, and his presence in the wider world far less prominent—the main reason being that he had never commanded a faction of his own, nor held any independent standing; from beginning to end, he had simply been a loyal attack dog serving the great Qi clan of Hebei.
Among the great clans that had once existed within the Wu dynasty’s territory, the one with, arguably, the most disreputable reputation was the Qi clan of Hebei. Before the Black Water Alliance, the great clans of Hebei had still had the Wang clan of Wang Qisong to check their power, and in Hedong, the Zuo clan of Zuo Duanyou to answer them in kind. But once nearly all the men of the Wang clan had died out and its women had retreated south, the Qi clan alone came to dominate Hebei.
Thanks to their favorable position, the Qi clan had always been especially eager for trade with the Liao state, and firmly stood on the side favoring peace negotiations. It was for this same reason that, when a Liao nobleman had once been stranded in Jiangning, the Qi clan had sent Lu Tuo to rescue him—and, taking the opportunity, had also sent men to assassinate Qin Siyuan, who was on the verge of returning to power at the time. Had Lu Tuo not been occupied at that moment with the rescue mission, then Qin Siyuan, along with Ning Yi, who happened to cross paths with him, would very likely have found themselves in real trouble running into a man as ruthless as Lu Tuo.
After the fall of the Liao state, the Qi clan had remained firmly in the peace camp, and had been among the earliest to establish contact with the Jin as well; later, once the Jin occupied the Central Plains, the Qi clan had thrown in their lot with the Jin state, secretly backing General Li Xizhi, Pacifier of the East, from behind the scenes. Throughout all of this, Lu Tuo had always operated as an extension of the Qi clan’s will; his skill might be somewhat inferior to that of the now formidably renowned Lin Zongwu, yet within the wider martial world, he still had few equals—within the Beiwei Army, apart from her own father, perhaps only the vanguard commander Gao Chong could stand against him.
In a full military engagement, a master’s true value lay in serving as a commanding officer, in rallying the army’s morale—but a pursuit like this, between two smaller groups, was another matter entirely. On the very first day, this group had already been intercepted twice by scouts; the army’s scouts were all elite men, and yet before these masters, they proved unable to withstand even a handful of exchanges. Lu Tuo himself hadn’t even needed to step in personally—those he’d sent had simply caught up with the scouts and killed them.
Yinping could tell as much just from observing the middle-aged Taoist nun riding double with her, assigned to keep watch over her—tall and gaunt in build, her fingers hard as refined iron, tinged faintly with a bluish sheen, the unmistakable mark of claw techniques honed to true mastery. Behind them, the middle-aged man assigned to watch over Yue Yun was pale-faced and beardless, short and stocky, built like a ball, and yet when he dismounted and walked, he moved as though his feet barely touched the ground—a sign of deeply cultivated soft-power techniques of the Thirteen Guardians school. According to intelligence from the Secret Investigation Bureau, this appeared to be Qiu Tianhai, a vicious man who had once gone into hiding in Shandong; his White Ape Through-the-Back Fist, his soft-palm technique, and his springing-leg kicks were all of extremely high level. Having killed his own senior martial sister’s entire family years before, he had vanished from the martial world entirely—only now, with the Jin overturning the Central Plains, had he finally resurfaced.
Aside from these two, there were others among the group with exceptional lightness-skill, masters of Tang-style hand techniques and the Five Viscera Fist, skilled staff fighters, and men whose entire bearing, down to every gesture, radiated a martial ferocity refined into instinct. Even the Jurchens among them were, every one, agile and quick, with superb archery—clearly, this was a crack team the Jurchens had gathered with everything they had.
Even with the many masters within the Beiwei Army’s own ranks, assembling this many top fighters in one place all at once was no easy feat.
On the first day, Yinping had still held on to a sliver of hope, but this group had twice wiped out every Beiwei Army scout patrol they’d encountered, and by night, even the pursuing Beiwei Army officer, Xu Luan, had been ambushed and killed from behind—it was only then that Yinping’s heart truly sank.
Having been taught by Yue Fei since childhood, she was now able to see clearly that this group, led by that high-ranking Jurchen figure, was evidently supremely confident, intending to throw all of Xiangyang into chaos through their own efforts alone. Across such a broad stretch of territory, with over a hundred masters moving freely about, it wasn’t something a few hundred or even a thousand ordinary soldiers could hope to encircle; even if a small elite force managed to catch up from behind, without someone of Gao Chong’s caliber leading them, they would gain little advantage. And to deploy the main army would be a genuine gamble in itself—no one could say for certain whether the puppet Qi and Jin armies hadn’t already prepared to launch an assault on Xiangyang the moment such an opportunity arose.
This group wound and circled through the countryside, and by the second day, finally turned toward Dengzhou. They occasionally came across refugees, then encountered several groups of would-be rescuers, killing them off one after another; it was only from the group’s own idle talk that Yinping learned the unrest at Xiangyang had already alarmed the martial world nearby, and that a good number of martial artists based in Dengzhou and Xinye had already set out, hoping to bring General Yue’s two children safely home. And yet how could an ordinary, disorganized crowd hope to match these specially trained, expertly coordinated masters—more often than not, the moment anyone drew close, they were spotted and cut down before they could do anything at all. As for getting word out, there was simply no way to manage it.
On two occasions, the group had also dragged captured martial artists before Yinping and Yue Yun, humiliating them before finally putting them to death. Little Yue Yun, beside himself with rage, had cursed them furiously; Qiu Tianhai, who was assigned to watch over him, had a viciously foul temper, and only laughed uproariously before beating him soundly, simply for entertainment along the way.
By deep into that night, Lu Tuo and his group had drawn near this abandoned village, and with it, drew ever nearer to Dengzhou. In truth, given the speed these people could move at, the distance between Xiangyang and Dengzhou shouldn’t have taken two full days at all—only, the Jurchen leader in charge was far too full of himself, and this group evidently did not answer to the forces stationed at either Dengzhou or Xinye. Lu Tuo had seized Yinping and Yue Yun on something of a whim; having taken them, the group had been circling and doubling back through the surrounding area purely to draw the Xiangyang garrison out into the open, so that word could then be sent to Dengzhou and Xinye to strike while the opportunity presented itself.
After this constant, unrelenting travel, the group had grown somewhat weary as well, and upon reaching the area near this village, they stopped to rest, lighting a campfire and eating some dry rations. Yinping and Yue Yun were set down, and the cloth gags covering their mouths were removed. A man walked over and set two bowls of water down in front of them; Yue Yun, having been badly beaten earlier, was still recovering, and Yue Yinping looked at the man. “If you don’t untie my hands, I can’t drink.”
“Then drink lying down.”
“Li Gangyang of the Heart Fist! You’re Han Chinese too, why would you—”
Yinping tilted her head back and called out the man’s name; before she could finish speaking, a sharp slap rang out through the night air—the Taoist nun beside her had struck her, landing solidly across Yinping’s face. Yinping’s martial foundation and skill were both quite solid, and yet, faced with this blow, she hadn’t even registered it coming; a sweetness rose in her mouth, and her head buzzed and rang. The nun said coldly, “A woman should keep quiet. Speak out of turn again, and like your brother, I’ll pull out your tongue.”
Yinping’s eyes went bloodshot; she turned to glare at the nun, her face slowly beginning to swell. Around them, several people burst out laughing. “Li Gangyang, well, you’ve been recognized—quite the famous name, aren’t you.”
“This little wench does seem fairly well-informed, at that.”
“And who else do you recognize? Do you recognize me, old man? Him? And him?… Ha ha, go on, you needn’t be afraid of this lady Taoist.”
“Soft-Palm Qiu Tianhai, Wind-Rider Zheng San, Grand Origin Blade Pan Dahe… that one is Young Master Lin the Seventh, Buddha-Hand Lei Qing… and over there, the Fierce King of Hell, Lu Tuo…” There was a streak of fierce defiance in Yinping’s bones as well; she stared straight at the Taoist nun and named off, one by one, deliberately, every person she’d managed to identify. Lu Tuo, sitting some distance away by the fire, was simply listening to the Jurchen leader speak; hearing Yinping name him from a distance, he merely glanced over once, without any further reaction.
Hearing themselves named, some of the others fell silent, some looked displeased, and some laughed heartily. Most of these men were, after all, Han Chinese, and whatever their reasons for serving the Jurchens, no small number of them still had no wish to be called out by name. The Taoist nun, hearing Yinping speak, said nothing at all, only waiting until she had finished, word by word, before suddenly flicking her hand out. A sharp, ringing “clang” cut through the air, followed by a rapid series of clashing sounds—the man who had earlier said “you needn’t be afraid of this lady Taoist” had abruptly struck, blocking this flurry of strikes meant for Yinping.
The exchange between the two of them was so swift, like lightning, that Yinping could barely follow it. Once the exchange ended, the man beside her tucked away the short blade he’d kept hidden in his sleeve and laughed. “Little girl, you’re in real trouble now. Do you know, this Taoist beside you is ruthless and merciless, and she always follows through on what she says. In her younger years, a man wronged her; she later hunted him down and killed his entire family, more than fifty souls in all, not even sparing the chickens and dogs—the man who’d wronged her was practically torn apart, every inch of him. You dare provoke Heaven’s Calamity Claw, Li Wanlian? I won’t be able to save you a second time.”
Not far off, little Yue Yun struggled to sit up. “Every one of you lot has an uglier nickname than the last…”
Amid this exchange, the sound of fighting drifted over from the distance once more; the closer they got to Dengzhou, the more martial-world fighters kept coming to try to intercept them. This time, the commotion in the distance sounded fairly substantial; the outer perimeter men who’d been sent out were skilled fighters too, yet several figures were still racing this way, clearly drawn by the light of the campfire. The group here, however, showed no sign of concern. The short, round, pudgy Qiu Tianhai stood up, shook out his limbs, and said, “I’ll go get my blood flowing a bit.” In the blink of an eye, he’d passed through the group and gone to meet the figures charging in through the darkness.
The silhouettes of the fight flickered like ghosts in the distance; Qiu Tianhai’s Through-the-Back Fist, along with his leg techniques and soft-palm skills, made short work of it—in the blink of an eye, he’d killed three of the four attackers, leaving only one still standing, wielding a long blade like a man possessed, chasing after Qiu Tianhai and hacking away without ever managing to land a single hit.
This game of cat-and-mouse gradually drifted back toward the campfire; amid the others’ idle chatter and laughter, the blade-wielding man being toyed with by Qiu Tianhai was covered head to toe in blood. His swordsmanship might have been more than passable back in whatever town or city he came from, but before men like Qiu Tianhai, it simply wasn’t enough. Closing in, gasping for breath like a winded ox, he suddenly caught sight of Yinping and Yue Yun in the camp and froze for a moment, then shouted at the top of his lungs: “Could this be General Yue’s daughter and son! Could it be—”
Yinping and Yue Yun both shouted at once: “Look out—!”
Behind that man, Qiu Tianhai’s frame suddenly seemed to swell; though he’d looked like a short, round, stocky man a moment before, in the darkness now he seemed to have doubled in size. His striking force began on the left and released on the right, traveling through his entire body, the power of his limbs gathering into a single burst through his back—this was the White Ape Through-the-Back Fist’s ultimate technique, “Piercing the Clouds to Strike Heaven.” His skill was formidable, and the ferocity and precision of this single strike were plain even to onlookers like Yinping and Yue Yun.
There came a heavy, muffled boom—before the man could even finish speaking, blood sprayed from his mouth in every direction, and his entire body was sent flying more than twenty feet through the air. He was dead before he landed.
“Nice!” someone immediately called out in praise.
As the saying goes, the layman sees only the spectacle, while the expert sees the craft. Everyone present was, after all, a master of their own art, and couldn’t help but offer a few words of commentary and praise. Someone said, “Old Qiu’s power has improved again.”
Someone else said, “That Through-the-Back Fist technique, force traveling through the whole body and releasing at a single point—truly extraordinary. Old Qiu, that’s quite a way you’ve got of generating power there—we should find time to compare notes sometime.”
Having shown off this signature move, Qiu Tianhai swaggered back amid the endless praise, thoroughly pleased with himself. On the ground nearby, Yinping and Yue Yun looked at the dead man, jaws clenched tight. Yue Yun suddenly burst out laughing. “Ha ha ha ha, what’s so impressive about that!”
Coming from a twelve-year-old boy, his voice still cracking, these words struck a harsh, jarring note amid all the praise—but no one there wanted to lower themselves to actually argue with him over it. An older man skilled in staff techniques glanced at Yue Yun and said loudly, “Your father, of course, has even more impressive skills than that—if the chance ever comes, this old man would like to trade a few moves with him too.”
Yue Fei, as the final disciple accepted by Iron Arm Zhou Tong, was already famous throughout the martial world for his formidable skill; hearing the old man say this, everyone else nodded along in agreement as well. Yue Yun, though, was still laughing. “What’s so impressive about that? In real battle, on a real battlefield, how many men can the lot of you actually take down? Within my Beiwei Army, the men we respect most aren’t clowns like you, performing tricks for the crowd—it’s the men who charge into the enemy ranks on the battlefield, unafraid of death, unafraid of losing their heads. What good is your fancy fistwork when you’re just dogs serving the Jurchens—”
The moment these words left his mouth, everyone’s expression changed sharply. In truth, if these Han Chinese, already having thrown in their lot with the Jin, still had anything left to take pride in, it was precisely the skills in their own hands. If Yue Yun had said their martial arts couldn’t match Yue Pengju’s, couldn’t match Zhou Tong’s, not one of them would have raised the slightest objection in his heart—but this particular insult, dismissing their skill as utterly worthless, struck at the very core of their pride. Someone slapped Yue Yun to the ground. “Ignorant brat—say another word out of turn and I’ll flay you alive!”
Yue Yun’s mouth was full of blood, but he laughed even lying there on the ground. “Ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha… See that? Facing a pack of curs like you, young master here isn’t afraid of losing his head. Flay me alive? Your grandfather Yue Yun is only twelve years old this year—come and flay me, then, and if I so much as whimper a single word begging for mercy, then I’m no man! Otherwise, I’m your grandfather. Well, come on then—come on—mmph—mmph mmph mmph mmph…” Someone shoved a rag into his mouth, muffling him. “…using mud drums as your drums, mmph mmph…”
They couldn’t very well kill Yinping and Yue Yun outright at this point—whether to use them later to threaten Yue Fei, or to sacrifice them before the troops on the battlefield, both children still had considerable value. Qiu Tianhai, his face darkening, came over and stuffed the cloth gag firmly into Yue Yun’s mouth; the boy kept struggling all the while, repeating over and over toward Qiu Tianhai, “You’re a dog serving the Jurchens… dog, dog, dog…” Even with his voice muffled and distorted, everyone there could still make out what he was saying, and for a moment, a general sense of embarrassment settled over the group.
It was at this very moment that, over by the campfire, Lu Tuo’s frame suddenly surged upward, the gust of wind he raised sending the campfire flattening violently. Someone in the air let out a furious shout: “Who’s there—!” From the other side, another voice suddenly rang out too, booming like thunder: “Ha ha! Dogs serving the Jurchens, are you—”
Bursting suddenly out of the darkness was a fierce, domineering dark-red spear; it had appeared from one side of the camp, having crept in close in total silence, and only revealed itself the instant it struck. Lin the Seventh, one of the masters nearby, spotted it just in time and, forced into a hasty exchange, was sent flying, his whole body curling up from the impact. That spear, like a blade cutting through waves, tore straight through him and continued on, driving directly toward the spot where Yue Yinping and Yue Yun sat, while at the same moment, Lu Tuo’s own figure surged forward through the campfire, charging in like some demon god, sweeping up the serrated, heavy blade from across his back as he came.
The two figures collided head-on, blade against spear, and in that clash amid the night, a thunderous, crushing burst of light and force erupted between them.
Gao Chong, the foremost master of the Beiwei Army, had finally arrived—