On the first day of the eleventh month, the newly appointed Left Shilang of Rites in Nanjing, Lord Su Yan, set out from the capital to take up his post.
Measured in a straight line, Nanjing was even farther than Yan’an in Shaanxi. Since this was a reassignment and a demotion, there could be no imperial guards sent to escort him; so Su Yan hired twenty guards from a coach company.
Yu Wang was inclined to loan him the guards of his own mansion, but those days of feudal princes keeping tens of thousands of personal troops were long past.
Since Emperor Jinglong, following the late emperor’s will, had been reducing the princes’ power year by year, the quota of guards at a prince’s mansion had been fixed at five hundred, and they were placed under the court’s “Guard Command”, their comings and goings had to be registered and reported.
Thus, while Yu Wang’s five hundred guards could swagger about in the capital, they could by no means leave the city.
Yu Wang was furious, he felt the emperor’s unwillingness to deploy troops to escort Su Yan was one thing, but could the court not at least turn a blind eye to his being lent a few guards? If the civil ministers in court criticized him later, would he not be able to shoulder the blame himself?
Su Yan soothed him, “It’s all right, I hired guards; they know hand-to-hand combat.”
Yu Wang snorted, “What can a coach company hire? A bunch of common cutthroats! Besides, what if there are those with ulterior motives among them…”
Su Yan put his mouth close to his ear and whispered a few words.
Yu Wang paused, then tugged the corner of his mouth into a smile. “Very well, my little darling, you even understand military strategy.”
Su Yan slapped a sesame flatbread he’d bought on the street onto Yu Wang’s face. “Obedient my foot. I’m off; pay your debts!”
Yu Wang wiped the sesame off his face with his sleeve, bit into the bread where Su Yan had left his teeth marks, and watched Su Yan’s carriage as it pulled away. His eyes were full of both amusement and parting sorrow.
At dusk Su Yan’s carriage, flanked by the twenty “ragtag” guards, left the capital.
By nightfall the carriage had reached a county some fifty li outside the capital and they stayed at a roadside inn.
Around midnight a gang of vicious mountain bandits ransacked the inn. The new guards, having half-heartedly resisted, scattered like birds to save their skins and didn’t even bother to take their remaining wages.
Su Yan’s bed in the guest room was empty. The bandits searched the carriage but did not find the footman, the luggage, or the appointment edict; they only found a chrysanthemum whose stem had been cut off, left on a carriage seat.
Early the next morning that severed flower, stem and all, was set out on a wooden tray on the table in Cining Palace.
Qiong Gu knelt and begged pardon: “Your Majesty, ”
The Empress Dowager crushed the flower suddenly with her hand and cast it to the floor, her face white with a greenish tinge. “Who leaked the news?!”
Qiong Gu kowtowed repeatedly. “This matter was arranged by this handmaiden personally; no one inside the palace knew. The guards who were sent out have all been apprehended and are being questioned one by one.”
“Putting aside how he escaped the trap and deliberately left this flower, it is clearly meant to convey something.” The Empress Dowager’s fury slowly subsided as she considered it. “He is warning me, he not only knows the inner workings behind the scenes, he also knows my habits, yet he does not want to expose the matter or openly offend me; he used a trick to slip away. But if I act again, he will not fail to leave a countermove.”
“Fine, not yet twenty and already so scheming. If we let him grow unchecked, won’t he only stir up trouble at court?!” The Empress Dowager sneered and slapped the table. “So long as I live, that Su brat will never set foot in the capital again!”
At that very moment the “Su brat” she cursed was dressed in unassuming commoner clothes, sitting on a boat on the Grand Canal, holding a fishing rod.
He did not take the land route but travelled the Grand Canal. From Tongzhou on the capital’s outskirts he drifted downstream through Tianjin, Liaocheng, Jining, Xuzhou, Yangzhou… reaching Suzhou and Hangzhou, then switched to the Yangtze and headed west toward Nanjing.
The night rain had just stopped; the deep-autumn morning sun warmed his shoulders. Su Yan felt a tug beneath the water and decisively reeled in, a plump golden carp, fighting hard on the hook.
“Yaha, at least two jin, a lucky catch!” The disguised Lord Su shouted happily. “Xiaobei, come over, take it fresh and make a pot of carp-and-tofu soup… remember to add a little celery!”
—
“…Is it dead? If it is, call butcher Li next door to help carve it; I’ll give him an arm.”
A hard object jabbed into his lower back; Jinghong Zhui forced his eyes open.
The dizziness from cheap wine and a hangover still spun inside his skull; he felt like vomiting, but in the next instant he lurched up like a carp, grabbed a dry stick and thrust it at the other’s throat,
There was no throat.
To be precise, the man stood there as if his upper body had been folded down and fixed in place: his throat pressed inward near his knees, his chest pressed to his thighs, his lower back arched upward, his limbs bent and deformed, a grotesque figure even more malformed and ugly than a dwarf.
Jinghong Zhui’s stick struck empty air.
The creature forced up a tuft of white hair and lifted an aged, hollow face that showed disappointment. “Not dead, huh.”
If Su Yan had been present, he might have recognized the man as suffering from an incurable disease called ankylosing spondylitis, and already in its most advanced stage.
But to people in this era, such an appearance was indistinguishable from some demon or fiend.
Jinghong Zhui stared. “Are you man or ghost?”
“Ghost.” The creature said, “Everyone calls me Old Ghost Wei. You crushed my only broody hen to death.”
Jinghong Zhui glanced at the firewood pile and saw a hen, stiff and motionless, small and skinny, feathers nearly gone.
He tried to recall. He vaguely remembered spending his last copper coins on the worst jar of alcohol at the village tea stall last night, drinking it down, then staggering and wandering into some dilapidated thatched hut in this shabby village.
“…I’ve no money to compensate.” Jinghong Zhui said. Seeing the other greedily eye his solid arms and legs, he added, “If you keep coveting my flesh I’ll turn you into a real ghost!”
“Unfair, unfair.” Old Ghost Wei grumbled angrily. “I’m down an egg a day… you must give me an egg every day to make up!”
Jinghong Zhui said coldly, “I told you I’m penniless. That chicken’s worth at most ten wen; I’ll pay when I earn some money.”
Old Ghost Wei cursed, “Drunkard! Liar! Look at you, filthy and dusty, how will you earn money? If you won’t compensate me with chicken and eggs, then work off the debt: go dig silt in the canal!”
Jinghong Zhui ignored him and strode toward the broken fence gate.
Old Ghost Wei laboriously lifted his dry wooden cane and jabbed it at Jinghong Zhui’s belly.
Jinghong Zhui still held a stick in his hand and used it like a sword; with a casual move called “Broken Feather, Stripped Scale” he batted aside the cane head.
Though he had scattered his inner power and no longer had true qi, and had sworn never to use the Seven Kill techniques taught by the Seven Kill Camp, the basic sword moves remained, second nature, easily drawn and returned.
To avoid seriously injuring this monstrous man he used only a third of his strength.
The result surprised him: the stick flew away and the cracked, mud-caked end of the old man’s cane jabbed squarely into his belly, forcing him to stagger back several steps before he could steady himself.
Jinghong Zhui widened his eyes in astonishment and inspected the self-styled “old ghost” before him.
There was no trace of any qi flow in the man at all; he was simply an ordinary commoner.
Jinghong Zhui frowned, bent and picked up another stick. “Again.”
This time he was serious and used eighty percent power. A move called “Flying Cloud, Snatching Lightning,” though lacking inner-power support, was refined enough to drive off second-rate fighters in the martial world.
But again the cracked cane end jabbed his belly; Jinghong Zhui was sent flying backward, scattering the woodpile.
“Again!”
“Again!!”
“Again…”
“Again…”
Exhausted, Jinghong Zhui collapsed to the ground amid a tangle of sticks. The dead hen’s down drifted lazily and landed on his nose.
Old Ghost Wei waddled up with a grotesque gait and jabbed his cane into Jing’s bruised belly. “You’re so useless, you probably can’t even dig mud, you might as well die early so I can feast on several months’ worth of salted meat.”
Gritting his teeth, Jinghong Zhui flipped over, caught the man’s pulse, Old Ghost Wei’s meridians were empty; not a hint of true qi remained.
He asked in disbelief, “You have no internal power at all. How could you beat me?”
Old Ghost Wei shot back, “Why not?”
Jinghong Zhui said, “Not long ago I passed through Yanzhou and met bandits. I used a rusty iron sword and killed over two hundred of them, wiping out the whole bandit camp. Even without inner power, I still have my sword techniques!”
Old Ghost Wei laughed like a weasel. “Is that what you call a ‘sword technique’? Who taught you, the camp cook who handles the firewood?”
Jinghong Zhui was left speechless.
The secret Hidden Sword Sect had been passed down for centuries; the master pursued a ‘no-self, no-sword’ realm, yet someone reduced it to the work of a woodcutter!
Who, then, was this Old Ghost Wei, who looked like a monster?
“What a joke! Do you think sword moves are like a child learning to write, tracing strokes one by one? Even if the strokes look the same, that’s just lettering, not calligraphy!” Old Ghost Wei ranted louder, jabbing the cane’s end into Jinghong Zhui’s chest. “Such good bones! Such good sinew and muscle! All wasted, wasted! Better for me to eat you to fill my belly!”
Jinghong Zhui was jabbed so hard it hurt, but instead of retaliating, he asked, “Then tell me, what exactly is a sword move? What makes a sword move exquisite?”
Old Ghost Wei wanted to lift his head and raise his arm, to point his withered wooden cane at the sky, but his head, pressed to his knees, wouldn’t lift, and his hunched arms couldn’t rise. Furious, he wheezed and panted, his cane trembling violently.
Jinghong Zhui blinked, reached out, and tilted the end of the cane upward, propping it so it pointed toward the thatched roof behind them, close enough to count as “pointing at the sky.”
Only then did Old Ghost Wei catch his breath. Instead of answering, he asked in return, “What is a cloud? What is the wind? What are day and night? The four seasons? What is time? What is the universe?”
Jinghong Zhui was baffled. “I haven’t read many books. A cloud is just a cloud, wind is just wind. Day and night, the seasons, they’ve always been. Time passes day by day. The universe… is boundless, infinite?”
“If you already know that all things simply are what they are,” Old Ghost Wei said, “then why must the sword have ‘moves’?”
Jinghong Zhui was stunned into silence.
Old Ghost Wei asked again, “How many years have you practiced the sword?”
“Seven years… no, eight now,” Jinghong Zhui replied.
Old Ghost Wei shook his head. “Then you’ve been walking the wrong path for seven or eight years. Even your bones reek of blood, and your head’s not much better… Lucky for you, your internal strength is gone, otherwise, you’d spend this lifetime as nothing but a killer.”
Seeing Jinghong Zhui’s shocked and guarded look, Old Ghost Wei cackled strangely, like a weasel’s cry. “Every d*mn move of yours reeks of killing intent. When you face someone, your eyes go straight to their vital points and weak spots. If that’s not a killer, what is?”
Jinghong Zhui was silent for a moment, then asked coldly, “So what do you want? To eat me?”
Old Ghost Wei said, “If you don’t want to be eaten, lay an egg for me every day. If you can’t, go dig silt from the canal first.”
Expressionless, Jinghong Zhui stared down at his own hand, the calluses at his tiger’s mouth told the story of countless sleepless nights spent practicing. He had once believed himself gifted, perceptive, and resolute, one of the Seven Kill Camp’s finest assassins. And indeed, he had been.
Even stripped of all internal power, he never thought he’d be reduced to prey for others.
Yet now, this man, neither living nor ghost, had used a dead wooden cane to beat into him the truth: Everything you’ve learned these seven, eight years… is sh*t.
Worse than sh*t.
The feeling was… indescribable.
Just as Old Ghost Wei turned to fetch a kitchen knife, Jinghong Zhui spoke: “I’ll dig your silt. I’ll do all your labor. Just, teach me what the true Way of the Sword is.”
Old Ghost Wei snorted. “I’ll teach you nothing. The ‘Way’ was never something taught, it’s something understood.”
