Staggering, striking, thrusting, smashing — the force coming at him was like the raging flood of a great river, sweeping a man off balance no matter how he tried to hold his ground. Lin Chong pushed against that current, and was tossed and battered by it in turn. But in the process, a great many things, from far upstream in that river, came flooding back to him.

The warmth of childhood, kind and gentle parents, an excellent teacher, sweet young love — things he had not dared to remember through the long years of suffering, nearly forgotten entirely. As a young man of extraordinary talent, he had joined the Royal Fist Hall and become a formal disciple under Zhou Tong, coming to know his fellow students, sparring and comparing skills with them, occasionally testing himself against wandering martial artists as well — it was the finest circle of the martial world he had ever known.

His wife, Zhenniang, he had known since childhood; she came from a family of scholars, refined, virtuous, beautiful, and gracious. Lin Chong’s path had been a smooth one — well looked after within the Imperial Guard, never overburdened with duties — and in his free time the two of them would go out together, visiting temples to pay respects to the Buddha, or strolling in the countryside, deeply devoted to one another. Though Lin Chong himself had studied the classics in his youth, he was, after all, a man of the martial world; when his fellow disciples came calling, or when acquaintances brought other figures from that world to visit, his wife always received them with grace and poise. Many a rough-hewn outlaw, seeing the bearing of Mistress Lin, came to respect her even more than they respected Lin Chong himself.

What fine days those had been. With a virtuous wife at home, Lin Chong would sometimes set his wife’s company aside to share a bed with close friends from the martial world, talking of martial arts through the night, until she would come to remind them, past some point, to rest. Within the Imperial Guard, his exceptional skill earned him the respect of the soldiers as well.

All of this had come so naturally that it was only later he learned those smiles had been false — that beneath the surface people worked so hard to maintain lay another world entirely, one steeped in naked malice. He had not been prepared, and had been dragged into it before he knew what was happening.

In those days, he had weathered so little storm. Wandering martial artists who traveled far and wide would sometimes speak of tragedies in the martial world, and Lin Chong would nod along as though he understood completely, often even able to offer up more “stories” of his own, sighing along with them. When a man is driven to the wall, there is nothing left but the fury of an ordinary man — with a blade in hand, he could surely move forward without hesitation. But when it actually happened to him, he learned just how hard that ordinary fury truly was. The life he had once known, that normal world, felt like countless hands pulling him back — he only wanted to return to it…

For more than a decade now, he had stood in the darkness, wanting to find his way back.

That world had been too happy, too whole.

Zhenniang…

The wife he had been forced to divorce watched him now, from the far end of memory.

…

He could never go back.

…

“Ahh—” The spear in his hands shattered with a crash—

One side pressed forward like a rolling war chariot, occasionally smashing aside anything heavy in its path. The other moved like the point of a spear itself, staggering and spinning, every strike either a silent thrust or a forest of jabs, so relentless that no one dared meet its edge directly.

In the decade since the Jurchens marched south, the Central Plains had suffered bitterly, and among the outlaw factions that had grown most powerful in that time, the Great Brightness Sect gathered an especially deep bench of skilled fighters. But even so, before this sudden clash of grandmasters, the crowd found itself utterly bewildered.

Among the outlaws, the word “grandmaster” was often thrown around loosely enough, but in truth, across this whole realm, only a handful of fighters truly stood at the very top. Lin Zongwu’s claim to being first under heaven was no empty boast — it was a title he had earned through real combat. Over the years, as head of the Great Brightness Sect, he had fought his way across the length and breadth of the land, possessing strength that far outstripped everyone else’s, and treating others always with courtesy and humility — this was precisely what had let him settle, in this age of chaos, into the undisputed position of first among the outlaws.

In these past years, throughout the Central Plains, even the legendary iron-armed Zhou Tong himself might not, in most people’s estimation, have measured up to Lin Zongwu as he now stood. But Zhou Tong was already dead, and such speculation had no way of ever being tested. Over the years Lin Zongwu had fought his way through one contest after another, and the battle that had come closest to matching him against a true rival had been last year, in Zezhou — when the Eight-Armed Dragon King of Chifeng Mountain, having reentered the martial world after the mountain’s collapse, had unleashed his Demon-Subduing Staff technique with a majestic, world-spanning power in that clash, only to be finally overcome by Lin Zongwu’s overwhelming assault, one that seemed to churn seas and swallow heaven itself.

Outside the Central Plains, in this present age, Zhou Tong was long gone, the Sagely Duke had died young, the Demon Cult no longer existed, and the Overlord Blade had fallen into decline — in the minds of many in the martial world, the only figure who might still stand against Lin Zongwu was the Heart Demon in the south. Of course, Ning Yi’s reputation among the outlaws was a complicated one; whatever made him so feared bore no resemblance at all to what made Lin Zongwu formidable. Beneath even that tier, there was Chen Fan, once a disciple of Fang Qifo, who had once slain the Demon Cult’s Holy Maiden, Sikong Nan — but because he had shown himself so rarely in the wider martial world, few people had much of a sense of him at all.

No one could have predicted that this perfectly ordinary trip to Wozhou would end up encountering a madman like this — one whose sudden, senseless violence even Lin Zongwu himself, stepping in personally, could not suppress.

It took only a moment’s observation of the fight’s outcome so far for everyone present to understand: this man, too, already fought with the skill of a grandmaster. His technique was bizarre, disjointed, and both his appearance and the look in his eyes suggested a man in utter despair, fighting to the death — and yet his strikes, when they came, were terrifying beyond measure. Lin Zongwu’s inner strength ran deep and his physical power was immense; an ordinary man struck by even a single one of his fists would have every bone shattered, all life gone from him. Yet this man met every killing blow head-on, as if witlessly hurling himself again and again into a raging tide — and time after time, in the very heart of that tide, his own counterstrikes forced even Lin Zongwu to retreat.

Unlike the battle at Zezhou last year, where even with hundreds watching, the duel between Lin Zongwu and Shi Jin had never once endangered the crowd, this madman fighting now showed no restraint whatsoever. As he fought Lin Zongwu, he was again and again driven back in seeming disarray by the man’s fists and kicks — but that was only surface appearance. He fought like a man determined to die, unyielding, and every time he was smashed apart, every time he was sent flying, he rose again somewhere new and pressed the attack once more. The violence of this fight spread wildly in every direction; anyone within reach was caught up in it, and this madman treated whoever was nearest as an enemy — if he happened to be holding a spear, anyone within several yards might be caught in the blast. Onlookers who failed to dodge in time found that even Lin Zongwu himself could spare no attention to save them; the man’s spear-work had become something absolutely lethal, so desolate and merciless that even Wang Nantuo had nearly had his heart pierced through by it earlier. Even skilled fighters nearby scrambled in near panic, trying to avoid the fate that had befallen Feng Qihe and the others.

Fences toppled, stone locks flew everywhere; the bluestone-paved courtyard, its weapon racks scattered across the ground, and even a tree at the courtyard’s edge, thick as a rice bowl, had already been knocked flat, branches and leaves scattered in all directions. Some of the more skilled fighters had climbed onto rooftops just to dodge the fighting. The two grandmasters, locked in their frenzied battle, had already knocked down a section of the courtyard wall; Lin Chong grappled with Lin Zongwu and sent him crashing to the ground, and the two figures went tumbling together for five or six full spans before finally breaking apart, if only slightly. The moment they rose again, Lin Zongwu closed the distance with a heavy punch, meeting a slab of stone table that the other man had swung at him, the impact scattering stone fragments for several spans, the force behind it still faintly terrifying.

In the sweltering summer night, this duel between grandmasters had already gone on for some time. Those on the outside merely watched a spectacle; those within the martial world understood what they were seeing. A few of the Great Brightness Sect’s better fighters had begun to notice something in how this madman fought — he had woven spear-technique into his unarmed combat, and though it looked grief-stricken and half-crazed, there was, faintly, unmistakably, the shape of what had once been Zhou Tong’s spear technique buried within it. Iron-armed Zhou Tong had held court at the Royal Fist Hall and had been renowned across the realm for more than thirty years; though he had died ten years earlier in the assassination attempt on Nian Han, his disciples had scattered far and wide, and there were still no shortage of martial artists who could recognize the shape of his spear technique even now.

But knowing the shape of Zhou Tong’s spear technique was not the same as knowing just how formidable Zhou Tong himself had truly been — rumor in the martial world was rarely accurate about such things. In his younger days, before Lin Zongwu ever sought a match against him and failed to get one, and even after Zhou Tong’s death, what remained in the martial world’s memory of him was mostly his reputation for martial virtue. As for his actual record — by his later years, when Zhou Tong fought anyone, it was either a matter of two or three moves before the opponent fell, or the opponent simply knelt before he ever raised his hands. He had reached a level of mastery that could not be captured by any set of forms or any string of signature techniques.

In this moment, this sudden, unexpected grandmaster seemed to be channeling Zhou Tong’s spear-work into the world once again, in another form entirely.

Though this madman had come in swinging with murderous intent from the start, once the crowd registered what they were watching, everyone still found themselves bracing with full attention. Anyone who had lived in the martial world understood the significance of a battle like this.

The restless, chaotic atmosphere of the night pressed on, this frenzied duel raging as if it might go on forever. The madman’s body was drenched in blood; Lin Zongwu’s robes were in tatters, his head and body already marked with countless wounds from the exchange. Suddenly, the fighting below paused for an instant — the madman had abruptly halted his assault, and as their inner energies pulled against each other, Lin Zongwu, across from him, stopped as well. In the courtyard, the madman suddenly let out a long, anguished cry, and his body surged forward with renewed force. Lin Zongwu, too, rushed several steps forward — but the figure had already broken past the outer wall of the martial hall and was racing off toward the distant street beyond.

Everyone froze for a moment where they stood.

The martial hall now lay in ruin, half the corridor collapsed, corpses scattered everywhere, the reek of blood thick in the air; a few of the fighters who had not fled had taken to higher ground nearby to stay clear of the battle. The madman’s killing intent had been so absolute that no one but Lin Zongwu had dared meet him head-on, and even Lin Zongwu himself was now covered in blood. His inner strength ran deep and his outer strength was formidable; over the years, even a fighter of Shi Jin’s caliber had never battered him into such a state. Watching his opponent suddenly rush off, he had assumed the man meant to unleash more slaughter elsewhere. Instead the man simply stood there now, arms streaked with blood, the skin over his knuckles split open, trembling faintly, watching his opponent vanish — whether from fury or from shock, his expression was, in that moment, impossible to read.

If the Great Brightness Sect truly wanted to deal with a grandmaster-level opponent, mobilizing more than just the people present would have been easy enough — even strong bows and crossbows could have been brought in in numbers, had it come to that. But Lin Zongwu had built his name on martial skill, on countless one-on-one duels over the years, and no one would have dared bring bows and arrows into a moment like this — win or lose, doing so would have cost him the very name of “first under heaven.” No one could have predicted that this clash would break out so suddenly, still less that it would end just as suddenly. From the moment the madman had walked through the gate, he had carried a boundless, anguished fury, and that final howl before he fled was steeped in the same bitter, knotted resentment — as if he had endured every possible injustice the world could offer. And yet, in this moment, the crowd standing amid the ruins and along the broken walls, moving from shock to something closer to genuine grievance, felt this too: it was really they who had suffered the greater wrong here.

“What… just happened…” After a long while, Lin Zongwu finally clenched his fist and looked around. In the distance, Wang Nantuo was being supported to safety by others — Lin Zongwu’s intervention had saved his life, but the “Mad Tiger,” whose name had shaken the realm, had lost the use of his right fist entirely. Several skilled fighters nearby had been killed or wounded, and he, first under heaven, had still failed to hold the man back. “Find out who that was.”

Lin Zongwu pointed at Tian Weishan’s body on the ground. “Who was that. And that man Tan — what exactly happened between them… Find out!”

That night, the chaos in Wozhou had not yet come to an end. A figure sped through the streets; in the distance, the head constable of Wozhou’s yamen, having heard word of the disturbance, was rushing over on horseback with several patrol officers, blades drawn, trying to cut off the blood-soaked figure. “Mu Yi, you killed old man Zheng—” The men raised their weapons, and just as the figure closed the distance, the point of a spear turned and swept clean across the length of the street.

That single stroke left blood scattered across the ground.

Through the familiar streets and alleys, now marked with a chaos unlike any other day, Lin Chong tore through Wozhou, out of the city, and ran north.

…

In the middle of that desperate, murderous fight, all manner of things from the past had surfaced in his mind, bringing with them a pain that ran deeper than anything his body could suffer. From the moment he stepped into the White Tiger Hall, his life had been thrown into disarray in a single confused instant. When he learned of his wife’s death, his heart had sunk and then risen again, and he had killed in fury, taken to the mountains, made his choices — none of it, to him, had ever felt like it truly mattered — until the moment Zhou Tong kicked him away… After that, he had simply picked up scattered fragments resembling his former life from the sands of despair, warming himself by a light resembling what he had once known, deceiving himself, clinging on.

He could never go back.

Through the despair of the years since, tossed and drifting, had there been, somewhere in the cracks where that fragmentary light shone, anything of what he had actually been searching for? A widow who had become his wife, a son they had had together, the years since… in the moment he saw the body, it all felt as illusory as a flower in a mirror, a moon on water. Through that bewildering light, what he ultimately saw was, in the end, only himself from all those years before…

But they had had a child, after all…

In the midst of that violent battle, the grief still unspent, that turbulent tangle of feeling finally found a moment of clarity. The image of the child flashed through his mind, and with a long howl he surged toward the direction of the Qi family estate. As for those steeped in malice, Lin Chong had never known their identities to begin with, and now he had no thought to spare for them either.

He moved swiftly through the night, faster than a galloping horse, crossing the winding roads outside the city in the darkness. In the summer night’s heat, frogs croaked steadily from the fields along the road, and here and there in the distance the lights of a village could be seen. As a former constable, Lin Chong knew these roads well, and after some time — he could not say how long — he neared a nearby town, cut through past its outskirts, and arrived at the Qi estate to find people outside already beating gongs and drums to muster their men.

Covered head to toe in blood, Lin Chong leapt straight over the courtyard wall. A guard patrolling atop the wall barely registered the blur of movement before the courtyard below erupted into chaos.

On open ground, a grandmaster like Lin Chong might have struggled against a sea of numbers — but in the twisting confines of a walled estate, how many of the Qi family’s men could possibly keep pace with him? Some of the guards saw only a shadow flicker before their eyes and found themselves lifted bodily with one hand, the figure demanding, “Where is Qi Ao? Where is Tan Lu?” In moments he had already passed through several courtyards; people screamed, people raised the alarm, and the guards rushing in had no idea where the enemy even was — the whole estate had already descended into chaos.

Lin Chong pressed on in desperate fury, and before long had seized Qi Ao’s parents. He forced answers from them at knifepoint and learned that Tan Lu had rushed ahead earlier, urging Qi Ao to flee somewhere out of town to lie low for a while; Qi Ao had hurried off in his carriage. Knowing that their son might have offended someone truly formidable, the family had rushed to gather guards, just in case.

Lin Chong then demanded to know where the child was being kept, but no one there knew. It was only after he seized Qi Ao’s father and mother and forced them to summon a few of Tan Lu’s own men that, through repeated questioning, he learned the child had been taken by Tan Lu himself, to be kept as insurance for his own safety.

Lin Chong’s heart churned with waves of grief even as he pressed on with his questions, his head splitting with pain. He had, after all, once run with the outlaws of Mount Liang; after a few more questions, he killed Qi Ao’s parents with his bare hands, in short order, and charged back out of the estate.

With Qi Ao’s parents dead, faced with a killer like this, most of the estate’s hired men scattered like frightened birds. The town’s local militia had arrived by then as well, but of course they too were powerless to stop Lin Chong’s headlong flight.

By now it was already the early hours of the fourth day of the seventh month. There was no moon in the sky, only a scattering of faint stars accompanying Lin Chong as he pressed westward. In his grief he ran on and on without any clear sense of direction, the turbulent energy in his body gradually settling as it adapted to the exertion, flowing on ceaselessly like a great river. That night he had first been struck down by despair, his blood and breath thrown into chaos, and then, in his fight with Lin Zongwu, had suffered wound after wound — but through more than a decade of near-total self-abandonment, he had unconsciously refined and tempered himself all the while; the more his heart had suffered, the more deliberately he had tried to give up, the more his body had, beneath conscious awareness, continued to hone itself. Now that he had finally lost everything, he no longer held anything back, and with his martial path reaching its full culmination, his body, even through this night’s running, was gradually recovering its strength.

Intense emotion cannot sustain itself forever, and as Lin Chong ran on, the chaos in his mind gradually began to settle as well. As clarity slowly returned, all that remained in his heart was a vast sorrow and emptiness. The grief he had been unable to bear more than a decade ago now spun through his mind like a lantern’s turning images; memories he had once been too afraid to recall now surfaced one after another, spanning more than a decade yet still vivid as if they had just happened. Bianliang in those days, the martial hall, nights spent discussing martial arts with companions until dawn, his wife…

Through that night’s pursuit, he never managed to catch up with either Qi Ao or Tan Lu. By the time the eastern sky began to show the first pale light of dawn, Lin Chong’s steps finally began to slow. He climbed a small hillside, the warm morning light gradually rising behind him, and as he followed the cart-tracks in the road, tears rolled silently down his face.

There was nothing left now…

Once this last round of tears had fallen, Lin Chong finally stopped weeping. By now there were travelers on the road as well; Lin Chong stole a change of clothes in a village and put them on. That afternoon he reached another of the Qi family’s outlying estates and forced his way in. After further interrogation, he learned that the previous night, in their flight, Tan Lu and Qi Ao had split up; Qi Ao had changed course partway and sent word for his men to gather here instead. Lin Chong’s child, though, was currently in Tan Lu’s hands.

Lin Chong’s resolve had settled by now. Thinking back on the previous night’s battle, he reasoned that Tan Lu, having fled midway through, would not have known the outcome of the fight — even if he had been frightened enough to run and save himself first, he would eventually need to return to Wozhou to gather information. Both Tan Lu and Qi Ao needed to be found and killed, but finding Tan Lu came first. With his mind made up, he turned and pressed on once more.

After another stretch of travel, by that night, his body finally began to feel real hunger. Lin Chong caught two snakes in the nearby hills, skinned them, and ate them raw. The road ahead stretched on endlessly; he had now gone two full days and nights without rest, but even when he sat down and closed his eyes, sleep would not come — his wife’s gaze, her smile, the sound of her voice all turned and turned before his eyes, a figure in white, vivid as life.

And so he walked on, and by dawn, as the sun once more broke brilliantly over the horizon, Lin Chong slumped down in the wild grass of an open field, staring blankly at the sunlight. Just as he was about to move on, he heard the sound of hoofbeats approaching — a large group of men riding in from the side toward a mountain road nearby. As they drew near, they slowed and dismounted one by one.

“Quick, quick, everyone ready your weapons…”

“According to the carrier pigeon message, that fellow’s heading south — he’s bound to pass through this mountain pass today…”

“He’s a tough target. The battle at Lüliang’s western pass, they say, left him wounding over twenty men single-handedly. This time, don’t bother with any code of the martial world with him…”

“Yesterday at Jinbian Market, we already wounded his hand and foot. Today, no way he escapes.”

“Everyone keep those bows steady—”

“Whoever brings this man down gets a hundred strings of cash each! Whoever kills him with their own hands gets a thousand—”

The crowd surged forward, shouting and calling out — from the sound of the footsteps, there had to be seventy or eighty of them, all armed. Lin Chong sat where he was, against a pile of loose stones, hidden in a thick patch of tall grass, and for a moment no one noticed him. He paid the men no mind, only staring blankly at the morning glow — many years ago, he and his wife had often gone out to walk in the countryside, and had watched the early light just like this.

The seventy or eighty men moved into the woods not far off and lay in ambush. A few leaders remained nearby, watching for movement in the distance. Lin Chong wanted to leave, but knew that showing himself now would only cause trouble, so he waited quietly. In the distance, a figure came racing along the mountain path.

These seventy or eighty men, it seemed, were all lying in wait for one person. Once they engaged, he would be able to slip away — Lin Chong thought to himself. The approaching horse drew nearer, and he heard someone say quietly: “This one is truly formidable, one of the finest in the martial world. When the fighting starts, don’t get involved.”

“…Father, how could we just…”

“You don’t understand. This man is the Eight-Armed Dragon King of Chifeng Mountain — he fought the man who’s first under heaven to a real contest. His head is worth a fortune today, and we’re here to collect it, but in his death throes he’ll cost us men before it’s done. Don’t go throwing your life away for the excitement. The reward from above is worth far more than a hundred strings to just one man… Your father will handle it. You live, and you’ll have money to spend.”

The father and son had barely finished this exchange when a shadow suddenly fell over them from the side. The two turned to find a tall man standing there, his face marked with old and new scars mixed together, dressed in clothes clearly too small and worn for a farmer’s garb, his head tilted, watching them in silence, his eyes filled with a bitter grief. No one around had noticed when he had arrived.

The father and son had been crouched low to the ground. The young man suddenly drew his blade and swung — the long blade came down, and the man across from them merely waved a hand; the blade’s path reversed and swung back the other way, and the young man’s head flew off into the air. The older man’s eyes bulged in fury; he sprang to his feet, and a fist landed on his forehead. His body staggered back several steps before he collapsed, his skull shattered, dead.

The commotion instantly drew everyone’s attention. The approaching horseman was already close, and the rider leapt down, moving on all fours at nearly the same speed as the galloping horse, like a giant spider splitting through the tangled grass, climbing the slope. Arrows fell like a swarm of locusts, but not one struck him.

From within the woods, someone shouted; a man leapt out with a spear not yet fully raised, only to have it suddenly change direction and pierce clean through his own body, pinning him to a tree. Lin Chong’s figure moved past from the side, and in an instant transformed into a blur of wind, sweeping toward the dense crowd ahead…