The gathering had been warm and enjoyable, but everyone had their own affairs to attend to, and naturally the group dispersed before long. Ning Ji went home and continued honing his martial skill based on what he’d taken away from the day, and did not go to keep watch over the young mongrel that night.

The next day was the Qixi Festival, the day when women prayed to the moon for skillful hands and hoped for good matches in love, while for men the main observance was to pay respects to the God of Literature and pray for success in the examinations. The Huaxia Army held no shortage of activities that day, the liveliest of which was likely the discount sale of several designated examination textbooks at the book market.

For instance, the beautifully printed collector’s edition of Principles of Natural Philosophy was reduced to the price of an ordinary, roughly bound edition — the paper quality alone was enough to make people’s hearts flutter. Since the detailed examination regulations had only been published the day before, that day saw a huge crowd of scholars flocking to buy the books, causing congestion at every specialty bookshop in the city, while the various great scholars and prominent figures gathered on the upper floors of nearby teahouses to identify the buyers, cursing loudly and bitterly, some crying out that this was nothing but a scheme by the Huaxia Army to split everyone apart, calling for unity.

Most of those openly buying the books were poor scholars of humble origin — some kept their heads down and hurried off with their purchases, while others walked away with heads held high, unbothered by the crowd of great scholars’ condemnation. By that afternoon, more and more cases began appearing of people asking others to “buy on their behalf,” and the Huaxia Army made no move to stop it — the purchase limit set per person was two sets, one for personal use and the other, quite reasonably, to be secretly resold to someone else.

Amid the chicken-and-dog chaos of the festive atmosphere, Ning Ji, working at the tournament grounds that day, overheard all sorts of chatter about the goings-on outside. There was even a brawl among scholars on a nearby street, drawing the spectators and fighters from inside the arena rushing out to watch, and they returned clicking their tongues over how chaotic the scene had been, a pity the Huaxia Army had arrived too soon for anyone to actually be killed.

In the days that followed, the mood within the city continued to swing between restless and chaotic in much the same way. For Ning Ji, the thing he felt most keenly was the sharp rise in the number of tournament participants; fighters with genuine internal-style skill, men of real accomplishment, were becoming more and more common by the day.

Out in the wider world, after a month or two of gathering and mingling, the leading figures among both the scholars and the martial artists had, through this great gathering, made names for themselves, and people sharing common goals had gradually begun to recognize and join up with one another. Among the scholars, some, hoping to overwhelm the Huaxia Army through sheer scholarship, made themselves conspicuously and openly visible; others, harboring more radical thoughts and growing ever more wary of the Huaxia Army, had begun operating beneath the surface, quietly reaching out to like-minded companions; still others wavered back and forth, the most idle and noncommittal of the lot; and a very small number had actually embraced the Huaxia Army’s ideas about the four classes of people, natural philosophy, and popular enlightenment, openly speaking out against the great scholars — though, of course, it was never easy to say how many among this last group were secretly informants.

On the martial side, several masters of internal-style skill had finally begun showing overwhelming dominance in the arena, which lifted Ning Ji’s enthusiasm for watching the matches somewhat. But as word spread that the Huaxia Army would be selecting talent through the tournament, the fighters’ eagerness to show off grew stronger still, and incidents of broken limbs became a regular occurrence, considerably increasing his workload.

Sometimes Huang Shan would still come over to chat with him, trying to get friendlier. These villains hadn’t even started doing anything yet, and Ning Ji had already begun to find them thoroughly irritating.

Working during the day, wandering at night, going to listen to all manner of outlandish talk at Wen Shoubin’s place, then checking in on Qu Longjun, who spent every day shut up in her courtyard — over time, he came to realize that women were truly a fearsome thing.

Having grown up running wild in the mountains, studying under great masters, watching soldiers drill, and counting girls among his childhood playmates — girls who’d studied martial arts under Auntie Hongti and Auntie Xigua just the same as the boys, treated no differently from the boys in daily life, and every bit as vicious in a fight, throwing themselves into scuffles without the slightest hesitation, to the point that Ning Ji himself sometimes found it a headache — to these girls, being left out in the wilderness for ten days without food would hardly slow them down. But cooped up in a courtyard for three days the way Qu Longjun was, she’d probably be crying for her parents already.

Truly, different skills for different trades…

With the villains doing nothing but running their mouths and taking no real action, Ning Ji’s thoughts had grown increasingly wide-ranging of late, and watching Qu Longjun no longer stirred in him quite the same daily urge to kill her that it once had.

Having come straight off the battlefield, and having visited the families of more than a few fallen comrades afterward, he’d been holding onto a good deal of pent-up anger, fully intending to strike down without mercy whoever crossed him. Who could have guessed that after a month of surveillance, all that fighting spirit would be worn down by his enemies’ own sheer lethargy? Sometimes, watching Qu Longjun zone out downstairs while he zoned out upstairs, he could only feel that this whole lot of people was pitiable, infuriating, and laughable all at once.

Thus passed the hottest — though in truth not so unbearable — stretch of the dog days of summer, and by the thirteenth of the seventh month, Chen Fan, his elder brother and sister-in-law, and the others all came to celebrate his birthday. That evening, his ever-busy Auntie Xigua and his father even slipped over for a visit, encouraging him to keep studying hard and improving day by day — this was the pure, clear beginning of his fourteenth autumn.

Day by day, time slipped past. On the surface, the restless stirrings within Chengdu gave no clear hint of any great upheaval to come…

The fifteenth of the seventh month — the Ghost Festival — arrived, with yellow paper money and white streamers drifting through the sky, and by day the paper effigies of the ox-headed and horse-faced underworld guardians occasionally paraded through the streets.

In the northern corner of her courtyard, Qu Longjun burned paper money, mourning her father, who had died at the hands of the Huaxia Army years before.

Across the Chengdu plain, similar rites of remembrance, large and small, were taking place everywhere. Beneath the mild, peaceful sunlight, north of Meizhou, near the camp of the Huaxia Fifth Army’s First Division, in a prisoner-of-war camp, Wanyan Qingjue stood inside the tall fence, watching a cavalry unit assemble and set out in the distance.

“What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened on the Han dogs’ side…”

“Has someone come to rescue us?”

This prisoner camp wasn’t large, holding a select group of high-ranking captives. They already knew they would be transported to Chengdu in half a month’s time to take part in the ceremony presenting captives. It would be one of the most humiliating moments the Jurchen people had endured in forty years, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

Yet in this moment, a number of Jurchen nobles and commanders with real wartime instincts noticed something unusual about this particular deployment by the Huaxia Army, sensing that some unexpected development must be underway, and their thoughts couldn’t help but stir with fresh possibility.

Of course, one look at the guards surrounding the camp told them escape was out of the question — all they could do was pin their hopes on the Grand Marshal or Gushen coming up with some brilliant scheme to rescue them…

Back in Chengdu, in the afternoon, Xigua had already finished packing and, with a squad of guards, was preparing to mount up and leave via the guest road. Ning Yi walked with her partway. “Take care of yourself, going out there.”

“I’m the one leaving — you take care too. I keep feeling like some people are about to lose their patience.” Xigua took her husband’s hand, her expression showing a hint of reluctance. “Or, should I have Sister Hongti come over…”

“There are plenty of people here already, and Chen Fan’s watching from the shadows too — what’s there to fuss over?” Ning Yi said with a smile. “If you leave, it’ll actually be easier to draw them out. Don’t worry — a handful of hoodlums, what could they possibly manage? Your husband’s been through a hundred battles; whoever comes will die for it.”

“…The Butcher whose name shakes the realm, after all.” Xigua hesitated, then laughed anyway.

Ning Yi swatted her lightly. “All right, enough teasing. Make sure you leave the city with plenty of fanfare.”

The two exchanged another round of parting words, and Xigua rode off with her guards toward the western gate of Chengdu, sensing unusual attention on her the whole way.

…

At the same hour, the elder Lu Liutong was seated in the place of honor at a gathering, watching a group of young martial artists spar with one another in the courtyard, occasionally offering pointers alongside a few fellow elders of the martial world.

“When it comes to martial arts, what matters most is exactly this kind of exchange. Take the founding years of the new order, for instance — the fall of the Central Plains actually helped spread northern boxing styles southward. Look at these two young men’s stances — you can clearly see traces of both north and south in them… In this old man’s view, having such traces is a good thing, since it shows there’s been exchange. Very clear. It’s a bad thing only when there hasn’t been enough exchange…”

Though advanced in years, he possessed correspondingly deep knowledge, and his running commentary drew nods of admiration from the crowd. The two young fighters who’d received his pointers were especially delighted, feeling that a single word of guidance from these elders of the martial world was worth more than ten years of solitary practice at home.

Over at the tournament grounds, Lu Liutong’s son, Lu Xiaolun, had just broken an opponent’s leg with his Yellow Mud Palm. The referee declared him the winner, and he continued taunting the man even as he spoke, watching his opponent writhe on the ground clutching his broken leg, sneering without restraint. “Told you to jump around — not jumping now, are you!”

The young doctor who’d leaped onto the platform to treat the injured man pushed him aside, his face cold and clearly displeased. “Get out of the way, you already won.”

“Heh, that leg’s not going to heal properly anyway — don’t bother wasting your effort. He’s crippled!”

“Move.”

The young doctor crouched down and began the emergency treatment with practiced hands. Lu Xiaolun’s eyes flickered — having broken more than a few bones himself over the years, he also had a good eye for medical treatment, and this young doctor’s technique looked skilled enough that he might genuinely manage to restore seventy or eighty percent function to the man’s leg. A young doctor this capable was likely one of those who’d come straight off the battlefield with the Huaxia Army — and the moment that thought crossed his mind, he found himself taking an instant dislike to that particular cold, detached expression so common among Huaxia Army soldiers.

Just like that ungrateful bunch with Bàdāo the other day — so full of themselves!

Once the referee had announced the victory, Lu Xiaolun stepped down from the platform and walked over to where the wounded man and the young doctor were still working. Standing beside them, he said, “Little friend, been on a battlefield before?”

The young doctor, blood spattered on his face, eyes focused entirely on his work, ignored him. Lu Xiaolun then sidestepped over, casually shifting his foot as though to knock the broken leg out of alignment again without anyone noticing.

The moment his foot lifted, a crack sounded — the young doctor’s hand had, for some reason, already crossed over and pressed against his thigh, the force slight, but enough to press his leg back into place before he’d even had the chance to apply any real force. In that instant, the hair on the back of Lu Xiaolun’s neck stood on end, and the doctor, still crouched on the ground, looked up at him with eyes as cold as a viper’s. “What do you think you’re doing? Watch where you’re stepping.”

He released his hand as he spoke, and that flash of icy menace vanished like an illusion. Lu Xiaolun walked off toward the edge of the grounds.

A faint cold sweat prickled at his back.

Lu Xiaolun was already in his fifties now, having spent his younger years indulging in pleasure and roaming widely, but that wandering had also genuinely broadened his horizons, and by now he was considered no mean hand within the martial underworld. But in that one instant just now, he couldn’t even tell whether it had been instinct or genuine skill that had stopped him.

He only vaguely sensed that if the other man had carried a weapon of any kind, that single motion would have been enough to slice open the arteries in his thigh. To have someone casually press a hand against so vital a point without his even managing to react — was it that the other man’s skill was simply superior, or had he himself been careless…

Considering the young doctor’s age, he concluded it was far more likely that he himself had simply been careless.

The early-autumn sunlight fell over the streets of Chengdu that evening as he met up with a junior martial brother who’d come along with him, and together they headed toward the place where his father’s gathering was being held, his mind still turning over the matter of that young army doctor the whole way. As they passed through several streets like this, in a stretch with few pedestrians about, the junior brother beside him suddenly tugged at his sleeve. Lu Xiaolun looked up ahead to see a tall, broad-shouldered man wrapped in a grey headscarf approaching, his eyes anything but friendly.

The man was massive in build, half a head taller than Lu Xiaolun himself, his hands thick-knuckled and calloused — clearly another figure of considerable skill within the martial underworld. Lu Xiaolun paid no mind to the man’s size; his lifelong specialty lay in breaking bones, and he wasn’t afraid of raw hard power, though certain swift-moving weapon techniques could pose a genuine threat to him. Sizing the man up now, he cupped his hands in greeting.

“May I ask who you are?”

The man advanced with even, measured steps, fists swinging loosely at his sides. “Lu Xiaolun, disciple of the Six-Powers Elder. I’ve heard you’ve been going around the city talking about Bàdāo’s weaknesses lately. I’ve come to test your skill. Let’s have a go.”

Over this stretch of time, Lu Xiaolun had attended various gatherings with his father, keeping an eye on the experts pouring into Chengdu for the tournament, but he had no recollection of this man whatsoever. The stranger’s manner was composed, and in the blink of an eye he’d closed the distance, arms spread wide — his sheer build alone gave off an air of devouring heaven and earth. Lu Xiaolun charged forward to meet him.

Their arms clashed hard in midair, twice in quick succession, and Lu Xiaolun felt his own arms throb with pain. He drew both hands together, aiming his Eagle’s Claw technique straight for the man’s left arm, meaning to seize and snap it — when a gust of fist-wind whistled in from the side!

That punch drove up beneath his left ribs, and Lu Xiaolun’s mind rang with a violent shock, his entire body seeming to turn inside out, last night’s dinner threatening to come back up; a surging wave of pain shot straight to his skull, and in the next instant his Eagle’s Claw could no longer hold onto the man’s arm. The man stepped back, then drove a fist straight into his face, before hoisting him up and, with a single spinning step, hurling him flying through the air.

Lu Xiaolun’s body tumbled seven or eight zhang down the road, yellow dust flying up everywhere. The junior brother who’d been standing nearby rushed forward to help, only for the huge man’s bowl-sized fist to come down and knock him flat, unconscious.

Lu Xiaolun spat a mouthful of fresh blood onto the ground and tried to push himself up, but with his stomach still churning violently, he couldn’t manage it. The big man, though he clearly hadn’t held back entirely, looked down now at the pair of martial brothers sprawled in the road and finally shook his head. “Sigh, chasing after empty fame and reputation, as always…”

“You’re… you… are…”

Lu Xiaolun forced the words out, struggling to hold back the urge to retch. Having mixed in the martial underworld for thirty years, he understood well enough that a man could take a beating, but he couldn’t afford not to know who exactly had beaten him — being struck down by the likes of Zhou Tong, or Lin Zongwu, or the Inner Demon, and surviving it, was originally supposed to count as a badge of honor. For this man before him to be so overwhelmingly skilled, how could he possibly be some nobody?

Beneath the setting sun, the man made no reply, and in the blink of an eye had vanished down the far end of the road.

…

The figure who had beaten Lu Xiaolun walked on through several streets, and by the time he arrived outside the tournament grounds, the day’s matches happened to be letting out. He put on a wide-brimmed hat and stood quietly at the roadside by the noticeboard, studying the résumés and stories of one “master” after another, gauging their respective skill and hoping to catch some clue as to the true strength of the Huaxia Army — or perhaps, hoping to learn just how formidable this so-called Inner Demon truly was.

Over this stretch of time, he had also been cautiously searching for companions who might prove trustworthy. He’d assumed that the Lu family, so puffed up as leaders of the martial underworld, who seemed to have some grudge with Bàdāo besides, would prove to be something impressive — who could have guessed that after actually crossing hands with them, they turned out to be nothing but small fry.

Watching the crowd streaming out of the tournament grounds, his expression carried a certain complexity. He had devoted his whole life to the practice of boxing, loving martial arts to the point of obsession, and if it had been at all possible, he too would have liked to throw himself into this contest of skill among the realm’s finest fighters, to test the true measure of the world’s martial artists.

But it couldn’t be helped.

This time, it was none other than Left Chancellor Tie Yan himself who had come personally to his door, asking him to come out of retirement.

A gentleman gives his life for one who truly knows his worth.

Some of life’s small pleasures, then, would simply have to be set aside.

So thought Wang Xiangfo.

Having watched for a while longer, he turned and walked off, leaving the street. Along the road, a young doctor carrying a portion of pig’s-head meat he’d just bought passed him on his way home — the two brushed shoulders without either taking notice.

The sun sank below the horizon, and in the shadows, people gathered in secret.

“…If we don’t act soon, the Huaxia Army will finish clearing up the surrounding matters and move into the city.”

“…That’s exactly why we’re meeting today.”

“…This afternoon, Liu Xigua led a group out of the city.”

“…She’s gone to handle some urgent matter.”

“…After the war in the southwest ended, the Huaxia Army took nearly forty thousand Jurchen prisoners, and the surrendered Han troops numbered well over a hundred thousand…”

“…Resettling and reorganizing all these men, along with securing the entire Sichuan region and handling every manner of aftermath, has exhausted the strength of the Huaxia Fifth Army…”

“…They’re planning to free up their hands at the start of the eighth month for the parade and the ceremony presenting captives…”

“…Nothing but militarism run amok.”

“…Cursing them accomplishes nothing…”

“…The Huaxia Army needs time to handle its affairs, and our own people aren’t arriving quickly either. With things this chaotic on the outside right now, it looks like if we wait much longer, these scholars are going to start fighting amongst themselves…”

“…If we want to act, this is the only window we’ve got…”

“…And luckily, that old ox-head on their side has run into some trouble…”

“…The one surnamed Liu, from Bàdāo’s side, has stepped forward to calm things down, and I hear the Huaxia Fifth Army’s First Division has also received urgent orders to move out. That means their manpower will be stretched thin for the next few days…”

“…Ghost Festival — the day the gates of the underworld swing open. It has to be these next few days… Everyone, what do you say?”

…

…

…

The silence stretched on for a long while, until at last someone rapped a finger down on the table.

A single tap.

“…We will succeed. Everyone will rise as one.”

…

…

Back in the courtyard, Ning Ji, returning home a little late, lit some yellow paper money, laid out the pig’s-head meat before it, and offered his remembrance to two or three people from his memories. The autumn night felt all the more pleasant for it; he was still not quite old enough to fully grasp the meaning of the rite, and after murmuring a few words, he sat down with his rice and finished off the meat.

Summer had come and gone, and he’d grown another year older; outside, everything seemed peaceful, utterly unlike the atmosphere before the Jurchens had come. Perhaps there wouldn’t be any more fighting and killing from here on out.

…Disappointing.