Under the summer hillside, the sunlight had begun to grow fierce. What had, a moment before, still seemed a quiet sky suddenly erupted into wild, boiling chaos. From the rock-strewn woods, men burst out brandishing blades, their faces twisted with ferocity, howling like beasts from some primordial age, frenzied enough to strike fear into anyone who saw them.

“Get him—”

“Ambush—”

“Kill him, kill him—”

“Luo Zha—”

The shouts tangled together into a single roar. Seventy or eighty men was not, in itself, a large number, but bursting out all at once before one or two people, it felt like an endless sea of men. Lin Chong’s body moved like an arrow, cutting in from the side, and within moments four or five men were already rushing at him. The first to reach him hurled throwing knives and other projectiles, but by the time these left their hands, the intruding figure was already upon them, slamming into one man’s chest and pressing forward without slowing.

The men beside him had no time to stop; they only managed a hurried, clumsy swing of their blades before Lin Chong’s body swept past. He grabbed one man by the throat in passing. The man staggered backward, colliding with a companion’s leg; that man tried to swing his own blade, but his wrist was pinned against his own chest by Lin Chong, who wrenched the blade free and struck with it in the same motion.

The first man Lin Chong had struck flew back seven or eight spans, slamming into a tree, coughing blood, his ribcage already caved in. Lin Chong pushed on into the crowd, a kind of vortex seeming to move with him — three or four bandits were sent flying or tripped in his wake as he ran, cutting down several more along the way. The enemies scattered ahead began closing in, trying to cut off this sudden intruder.

The woods were sparse, and Lin Chong moved straight through them, cutting down three more bandits in passing with three swift strokes, blood spraying as they tumbled away. Behind him, seven or eight more men were already giving chase, but for the moment none could catch up to him. Nearby, a master with disheveled hair, dual blades, and a tattooed face let out a wild shriek and charged, first trying to cut Lin Chong off from the side, but by the time he closed the distance he found himself behind Lin Chong instead. Screaming, he slashed at Lin Chong’s back several times; Lin Chong simply kept moving forward, leaving the blade’s edge behind him — first by a step, then by two or three spans.

This dual-blade master was “Mad Blade” Luo Zha, from nearby Bronze Bull Fortress — the seventh-ranked among the stronghold’s nine chiefs, a man of some renown in the outlaw world. But Lin Chong, at this moment, cared nothing for who stood in front of him or behind him — he simply pressed forward. Ahead, a bandit carrying a spear thrust it forward; Lin Chong met the spear-tip head-on, his steel blade cutting along the shaft, blood erupting as the blade sliced through both of the man’s hands. Without pausing, Lin Chong swept the blade in a wide arc and flung it back behind him. The spear dropped to the ground.

Luo Zha, seeing this troublesome intruder momentarily blocked, raised both blades and charged even faster, only to see the steel blade come whistling back through the air behind him. He jerked his head aside with a cry, the blade grazing his cheek and striking a bandit behind him square in the chest. Before Luo Zha could straighten himself, the fallen spear on the ground suddenly seemed to come alive and leapt up from the earth.

Among spear techniques there existed the famed move known as “the phoenix nods its head” — and now this fallen spear, as if the phoenix had suddenly lifted its head, paused for an instant before Luo Zha’s eyes before being dragged back forward by Lin Chong.

Luo Zha, wielding his twin blades, kept charging forward several more steps before his stride finally began to falter and stagger, his knees buckling beneath him. He tried to rise, ran one more step, and collapsed again.

In the instant Lin Chong had reclaimed the spear, Luo Zha, unable to check his own momentum, had run his own throat straight onto the spear tip. The spear hung in the air, and it had severed his windpipe. Across the chaos-ridden Central Plains, this seventh chief of Bronze Bull Fortress had, in his own day, been a feared and formidable figure — and in the end, he died chasing a retreating shadow, running himself onto a spear point. The bandits behind him surged past his position, roaring and brandishing their weapons; some glanced back in horror. Ahead, the man’s feet never slowed, his spear jabbing left and right, and three more charging bandits tumbled into the underbrush, bodies convulsing, wounds spraying blood without pause.

In these years, with the Jurchens and the puppet Qi regime holding the Central Plains, most people lived in bitter hardship, and those with even a little skill often took to banditry, gathering into bands large and small across every city and town. The chaos of the age had worn away even the last shreds of decency among the outlaws; bandits who flew banners proclaiming resistance against the Jurchens more often than not made their living preying on Han people instead, and the constant, blood-soaked nature of their existence had bred a genuine viciousness in them. Even caught off guard by this sudden intrusion, the men still surged forward with wild fury.

On the other side, the man they had come to intercept — the messenger — moved with astonishing speed, cutting sideways through the scattered arrows into the flank of the crowd. His heavy eight-cornered bronze-clad staff broke on impact yet still dragged the pursuing men along as he pressed forward through the woods at tremendous speed. Five or six men fell in an instant, even as more surged in to replace them.

Both masters, though outnumbered, had chosen a similar strategy — charging into the crowd at full speed, using their footwork to keep circling and never letting their enemies converge into a single mass. Except this time, the primary target of the ambush was Shi Jin; the leadership of Bronze Bull Fortress had gathered in force, and the only man who had actually rushed over to intercept the other intruder was the seventh chief, Luo Zha.

The chief of Bronze Bull Fortress, Tang Kan, had been a ruthless, notorious figure in the outlaw world more than a decade ago; as conditions outside had grown steadily harsher in recent years, his own brand of ruthlessness had, if anything, made his stronghold’s fortunes steadily better. This time, having taken on a substantial sum of money to intercept the Eight-Armed Dragon King heading south — a scheme he would never have dared attempt while Chifeng Mountain still stood — Tang Kan had seen his opportunity. With Chifeng Mountain already torn apart by internal strife and the Eight-Armed Dragon King, having lost to Lin Zongwu, now regarded as one of the finest masters of the martial path in the whole realm, Tang Kan had set his sights on making a name for himself once and for all with this one great strike.

However formidable a master of the martial path might be, he was still no match for an ant swarm large enough to bring down an elephant. Over the years, Bronze Bull Fortress had, through sheer bloody ruthlessness, gathered no shortage of desperate men willing to die, though this same brutality had also drawn heavy pressure from the local authorities. If the stronghold wanted to keep growing, it needed to make a great name for itself, and killing the isolated Eight-Armed Dragon King was the surest path to that fame — reputation good or bad hardly mattered; even a bad name could let a man live well, while having no name at all meant slow starvation.

Having received the tip, Tang Kan had brought out the best fighters of the entire stronghold this time, every one of them paid in advance, unafraid of death. Shi Jin dodged the rain of arrows and plunged into the woods; his staff-technique was famous throughout the realm, unmatched by direct confrontation, but with Tang Kan directing his men to surround and press in from every side, they managed, bit by bit, to slow him down. This Eight-Armed Dragon King had already faced more than one or two ambushes on his journey south, and he was already carrying wounds from earlier encounters; if they could only slow him further, the crowd pressing in together, he would prove no match for eight arms after all, however his legend went.

Shi Jin already ranked among the strongest handful of men in the realm; even if some so-called “righteous heroes” had come to his aid, Bronze Bull Fortress was no stranger to killing one or two of those as well. But before long, the slaughter from the other side had unexpectedly spread — in the blink of an eye it had swept from the southern flank all the way around to the northern edge of the woods, and the stronghold’s men there had failed entirely to hold the newcomer back. In the midst of Shi Jin’s own fighting, breaking left and right through the crowd, the desperate men howling and charging at him, voices began rising from the other end: “This one’s dangerous…”

“Stop him, stop him—”

“Damn it, I’ll skin you alive, kill your whole family—”

The shouting carried nothing but panic now. Tang Kan, in the midst of leading his men against Shi Jin, shouted again: “Luo Zha—” only to have someone answer: “Seventh Chief is dead. This one’s trouble.” By now the woods rang with the din of battle on all sides, men charging with blades, men drawing bows, men lying wounded on the ground, the reek of blood thick in the air. Then Shi Jin let out a great shout: “Fine spear-work! What hero’s banner do you fight under?” The woods sat on a gentle slope, and from his higher position he had already caught sight of the figure below, moving forward, spear in hand.

The figure below called back a single word: “South!” His voice, though calm, carried on a surge of inner power that rolled outward like an ocean tide. Tang Kan felt his scalp prickle — this sudden arrival was clearly a master every bit the equal of Shi Jin. He gritted his teeth and rallied his men forward. “He’s not getting away—”

Eighty-odd men surrounding two fighters, one of them already wounded — what did being a grandmaster matter against that?

They had not gone far before, at the far end of the woods, a figure was seen cutting through with a spear, more than a dozen men chasing behind him, utterly unable to catch up. One of Bronze Bull Fortress’s minor leaders rushed to intercept, and the man, without breaking stride, thrust the spear out casually in passing — the leader’s body was sent tumbling onto the road, as naturally as if he had thrown his own chest onto the spear point himself.

The figure glanced briefly at Tang Kan from a distance, then curved off toward the upper part of the woods. Bronze Bull Fortress had no shortage of skilled men on that side, all of them running to cut off Shi Jin. Tang Kan watched as the spear-wielding man traced a vague half-circle from higher ground and came sweeping down, his gaze locking onto Tang Kan directly.

“Stop him! Kill him—” Tang Kan bellowed, brandishing a pair of heavy hammers, but the approaching figure moved faster than he had imagined, crouching low, using the downhill slope’s momentum to become a straight, gray-blurred line, stretching out toward him.

Around Tang Kan stood no shortage of Bronze Bull Fortress’s finest, and by now four or five of them had already lined up ahead of him. Everyone watched the racing figure approach, and for a moment, their spirits seemed to be stripped from them. A howling gust of wind swept in — the man wasn’t even carrying his spear now, and yet his running strides came down like an iron ox plowing the earth. Too fast.

Several men struck at nearly the same instant, but the figure moved even faster than the eye could track, plunging suddenly into the crowd and, in that single instant of contact, forcing a path open through the gap between blades and spears by sheer brute force. A human wall broken open by one man alone — Tang Kan had never seen anything like it. He saw only that overwhelming threat rushing toward him like a flood, like some ravenous beast, and swung both hammers down with all his strength. Lin Chong’s body moved faster still; his shoulder had already driven in, and his right hand thrust up between Tang Kan’s two arms, striking directly against his jaw. The entire lower jaw, teeth and all, shattered instantly.

The pounding impacts did not stop. Tang Kan’s whole body was flung into the air, tracing a diagonal line several spans long, before Lin Chong forced him back down, the back of his skull striking the ground first, his body twisting and rolling, crashing thunderously into a pile of loose stones. Lin Chong’s own clothes had shattered to pieces in that collision, and even as his momentum carried him forward, heat visibly rose from his head.

A few Bronze Bull Fortress underlings stood not far ahead of him; he swung his arm a few times, his stride never slowing, and the men hesitated for an instant before some backed away and others simply turned and ran.

From higher in the woods, a voice called out: “It’s Brother Lin…” There was hesitation in the words. Shi Jin, still fighting off attackers of his own, found the chaos around him beginning to spread even further. Some of Bronze Bull Fortress’s leaders still hoped to collect their reward, pressing on to surround Shi Jin or engage Lin Chong — but with Tang Kan dead, the chaos could no longer contain the two of them. Shi Jin cut down a few more men in passing, and the two of them fought their way out of the woods together. Bronze Bull Fortress’s men were scattering and fleeing all around by now; the two men headed south, and before long, in a hollow among the hills, they spotted the horses the bandits had ridden in on. Some of the fleeing bandits were already mounting them to escape; Lin Chong and Shi Jin each took a horse for themselves and rode south along the mountain road. Shi Jin, having by now confirmed that the man before him was indeed the sworn brother he had searched for over a decade, could hardly contain his joy. His own wounds were serious, but riding along like this, he seemed almost unaware of them at all.

The two of them had once, on Mount Liang, been the closest of friends, sharing their hearts openly with one another — but all of that belonged to a memory more than a decade old now. Meeting again, the young men they had once been had both grown into middle age, and for a long moment neither could find the words. They rode until they reached a mountain stream, where Shi Jin reined in his horse and signaled for Lin Chong to stop as well. With a hearty laugh, he dismounted. “Brother Lin, let’s rest here a while. I’ve got wounds that need tending — the roads aren’t safe, best not to press on carelessly.”

Lin Chong nodded.

By now it was midday, and the two of them stopped to rest beside the stream. As Shi Jin bandaged his wounds, he spoke of the years spent searching for Lin Chong after the fall of Mount Liang. “That was more than ten years ago now. I searched everywhere for you and found no trace. Later I made my way to Chifeng Mountain, and even there I kept asking around after you — I thought the worst had happened. Seeing you safe now… this is truly a fine thing.”

When the two of them had first known each other, Shi Jin had still been young and Lin Chong not yet middle-aged. Shi Jin, chivalrous and forthright by nature, had always respected Lin Chong’s literacy and gentle temperament, and had addressed him as an elder brother from the start. The young Nine-Dragoned Tattoo of those days had grown now into the Eight-Armed Dragon King, and there was, in his words now, the weight and substance forged by years of hardship. He spoke of it lightly, but in truth, the effort he had spent over the years searching for Lin Chong was beyond counting.

These past few days, Lin Chong’s emotions had been sunk in grief, and by this point he had already stopped concerning himself much with the passage of time — but suddenly encountering a brother from the past stirred something in his dark, weary heart, a sense almost of unreality, as if he no longer belonged fully to this world. Shi Jin, as he tended his wounds, spoke of his experiences and what he had witnessed over the years. Though tempered by hardship himself, he could tell something was not right with his elder brother’s state. More than a decade apart, and in that time even the emperor of the Central Plains had changed hands more than once — heroes and commoners alike had risen and fallen through it all, each bearing this world’s suffering in their own way. The Panther Head of old had carried a blood debt on his back, yet his emotions back then had still been contained within himself; now that estranged, desolate aura had risen fully to the surface. Earlier, in the woods, as Lin Chong ran and fought, his spear-work had already reached a state approaching perfection — yet each thrust carried a stillness, a cold detachment, that even Master Zhou himself had never shown, not even in his battles against the Jurchens.

Though Shi Jin, for his part, preferred to trust in this elder brother he had once known, over the course of his own life Mount Liang had been destroyed by internal betrayal, and Chifeng Mountain too had torn itself apart from within. He had grown used to walking this world alone, and this mission taking him south now carried too much weight — he could not help but keep a measure of caution in reserve.

After talking for a while like this, Shi Jin finished bandaging his wounds. Lin Chong, meanwhile, had gone off and caught two rabbits, building a fire by the stream. Shi Jin asked, “Brother Lin, where have you been all these years?”

Lin Chong was silent for a long moment, turning the rabbit over the fire, reaching up to press a hand against his own head. He thought of something and gave a faint smile. “Actually, Brother Shi — I have seen you once before.”

“Oh?”

“A few years back, in a place called Jiumu Ridge. I was… running an inn there with someone, and you passed through and got into a small dispute with some people from the martial world. By then you were already the famous Eight-Armed Dragon King — everyone knew of your work resisting the Jurchens… I didn’t come out to see you.”

“Ah…” Shi Jin nodded, though he found himself trying to place where Jiumu Ridge even was. These years had kept him extraordinarily busy, and small things like that had slipped from memory entirely.

“I know about a great deal of what you’ve done since — your name has traveled far and wide.” Lin Chong lowered his head, thinking back on it. All these years, hearing of this brother’s exploits, he had felt no small measure of admiration and shared pride himself, and now he spoke slowly. “As for me… after the fall of Mount Liang, I went to Yiyuan, and there I met with my master one last time. He said I was a coward, and disowned me as his disciple. Later… some brothers from Mount Liang turned on me, meaning to claim the bounty on my head. I didn’t want to kill anymore by that point, and in trying to flee them I ended up falling into a river… and after that… I was pulled out by a widow in a small village…”

The fire crackled softly. Lin Chong’s words came low and slow. Facing Shi Jin, his heart settled somewhat, but recalling all of this still weighed on him visibly. Shi Jin did not press him; he waited through the pauses in Lin Chong’s memory, and only after a while did he say, “Those animals — did you kill them all.”

“Later. Later on.”

“I had no wish to walk the martial world’s roads of blood and slaughter anymore, so I settled there.” Lin Chong lowered his head with a faint smile, then, with visible difficulty, tilted his head slightly. “That widow… her name was Xu… Jinhua. She was sharp-tongued and fierce in temperament. We ended up living together… I remember the village was called…”

As he spoke, recalling piece by piece, the rabbit meat finished cooking, and the two of them tore into it and ate. Lin Chong spoke of the state of the village where he had once lived in seclusion, of this and that small matter, of how the world outside had changed. His memory of it all was scattered, as if seen through a mirror or the surface of water — only when he drew close and looked carefully could he make anything out clearly. Shi Jin would occasionally add a line or two of his own — what he himself had been doing at such-and-such time — and between the two of them, piecing their memories together, Lin Chong could sometimes even manage a small laugh. When it came to speaking of his child, of his life in Wozhou, the cicadas were singing furiously in the trees around them, and Lin Chong’s voice slowed, punctuated now and then by long silences. This went on, on and off, for a long while. In the valley the stream murmured on, clouds drifted and gathered overhead, and Lin Chong leaned back against a nearby tree trunk and said, quietly, “In the end, she still died.”

“Who did it?”

Lin Chong gave a short laugh. “A man named Qi Ao.” Having said this, he laughed again, then reached up and pressed a hand against his forehead.

Shi Jin said, “And my little nephew, too…”

Lin Chong said nothing. Shi Jin brought his fist down hard against a rock. “How can that man be allowed to go on living!”

“You focus on healing first,” Lin Chong said, and then added, “He won’t live long.”

Birdsong rose somewhere in the woods, and the surrounding quiet deepened all the more. The two of them sat facing each other at an angle. Shi Jin, though clearly furious, said nothing more after that, only leaning his body back against the tree trunk behind him. In these years he had come to be known as the Eight-Armed Dragon King, but what peace had he really known? Across the whole of the Central Plains, where was there ever any real peace or stability to be found? Fighting the Jurchens, being surrounded and slaughtered, starving through lean stretches — all of this was commonplace to him. He had watched whole Han households wiped out, watched people dragged north to be enslaved, watched the tragedy of women violated, and worst of all, the most bitter horror of parents forced to exchange children to eat — he had seen far too much of it all. Even a so-called hero of the martial world had his own sorrows and joys; more times than he could count, Shi Jin had felt a grief deep enough to tear the heart from his chest, and had simply gritted his teeth and balanced it all against the desperate fighting on the battlefield.

That this suffering should have fallen upon his own elder brother now — the details hardly needed asking about. Out there, in the south, among the countless “starving ghosts” of the land, there was not one whose calamity was any lighter than this. That millions suffered such misfortune did not make any single person’s suffering less worth mentioning — but at this point, asking why had become meaningless in itself, and even the details had ceased to matter.

He sat like this for a long while, then let out a breath. “Actually, Brother Lin — these past years, on Chifeng Mountain, I was a great hero, admired by everyone. Quite the reputation, wasn’t it? There was a woman on the mountain I cared for a great deal — we’d agreed that once the world settled down even a little, we’d marry. Then, in a minor skirmish the year before last, she suddenly died. That’s how it so often goes — before you’ve even had time to react, the whole world has changed shape. After someone dies, there’s just this hollowness left inside.” He clenched his fist and lightly struck his own chest with it. Lin Chong turned to look at him. Shi Jin rose from the ground — perhaps from sitting too long in one position, or perhaps simply from having let his guard down entirely in front of Lin Chong — and swayed unsteadily on his feet for a moment. Lin Chong rose as well.

“Actually, sometimes, in this world, there really is such a thing as fate,” Shi Jin said, walking over toward his belongings. “On this trip south, I’ve been carrying something with me, and the whole way I kept wondering — why am I even bringing this along. Seeing you now, Brother Lin, I suddenly feel like… maybe it really was fate after all. Master Zhou — ten years dead now — and this thing sat up north for all ten of those years… Brother Lin, when you see this, you’ll be glad, I promise you…”

Shi Jin picked up a long, wrapped bundle and pulled off half of its cloth covering, revealing an old, weathered spear. He tossed it toward Lin Chong, and it caught the sunlight as it flew. Lin Chong reached out and caught it.

In the daylight, there came a faint, resonant hum.

Azure Dragon Crouch…

Something surged up from deep within him. Long ago, in his youth at the Royal Fist Hall, as one of the most gifted of Zhou Tong’s disciples, he had handled and cared for his master’s own spear many times over. Zhou Tong, though strict in discipline, had never been particular about his weapons — it had been no great matter for his disciples to spar and practice with Azure Dragon Crouch itself from time to time.

“Damn you… you coward—” That dark courtyard, the old man’s kick lashing out—

Memory and regret came rushing forward like the point of a spear, spanning decades of years in an instant. Lin Chong let out a sound of anguish he could not put into words; the spear in his hand felt like a burning coal, its light reflecting the sun so brightly he could not look at it directly. He held the spear for a moment, then, with a sudden motion, drove it into a boulder beside him. In the valley, Azure Dragon Crouch sank more than three feet into the stone, standing perfectly upright, pointing straight toward the sky.

“…Good!”

Shi Jin let out a cry of admiration and began to clap.