In the thatched cottage study of a village schoolhouse, a room bearing no plaque upon its door, the middle-aged Confucian Qi Jingchun sat in silent absorption over a board of go. It was no famous opening bound for the ages, no replaying of a contest between masters of the board.
He was just about to set a white stone upon its place when he heaved a sigh. The stone's rooted spot had long since been settled, yet all at once the Confucian began to hesitate over his move. He drew back his hand, but the stone remained suspended in midair, still a finger's breadth above the board.
Qi Jingchun kept his posture straight and dignified. As the sage charged with holding this domain in place, the former head of one of the seventy-two Confucian academies, the previous master of Cliff Academy, he remained an unalloyed Confucian of his age — never mind that he had been demoted to this post in hopes of redeeming his guilt through service.
To the common folk of the town, grasses wither and revive with every year of the seasons, and sixty years of springs and autumns pass in the blink of an eye. The schoolmaster had changed several times over — different faces, different ages — yet only that ineffable air of the scholar, which none could quite put into words, remained exactly the same: stiff, exacting, sparing of speech, and altogether, in a word, dull and wearisome through and through. Nor did anyone ever suppose that those several village schoolmasters who came and went were in truth a single man. And still less did anyone guess that, beyond the town, in the vast reaches of the outer world, this Master Qi, who kept so deeply to his seclusion, had once held a transcendent and lofty station, and borne within his breast the supreme divine power of an upright and inexhaustible vitality.
The next instant, Qi Jingchun's primordial spirit departed his body and journeyed far afield — like an immortal in robes of drifting snow-white, tearing free in a trice from the cage of his mortal shell, floating away to one of the town's lanes.
He reached the lane in a flash. He looked first upon the woman lying in the pool of blood — Cai Jinjian of Cloud Mist Mountain. Her three souls and seven spirits were flickering and dispersing, like a candle's flame guttering in the wind.
After lingering a moment beside her, he came at last to stand beside the pair of them.
The young heir of Old Dragon City, in his tall cap and wide sleeves, leaned slightly backward, his mouth agape, his face—fair as polished jade—wearing a tangled expression in which shock, confusion, and despair were woven together.
The boy kept that fierce posture of leaping high and lunging forward, his left hand gripping a shard of porcelain sharp as a blade's edge. Even at this crucial pass, when a single strand of fate divided life from death, the boy, his body still airborne, kept his eyes resolute and his face serene — quite unlike an ignorant stripling born in a mean lane's cramped house and raised in the wilds. Perhaps the only thing left that still suited his station was the helplessness hidden in the depths of his gaze. To a man who had walked out of a study and out of all the academies years ago, such helplessness had long become familiar: it was like watching a farmer who lives by the whim of heaven squat on the cracked, withered furrows of a drought-stricken field and turn his gaze up at the blazing sun. He would not rend his heart and lungs with anguish; he would only feel a profound helplessness, and a vast bewilderment.
As the temporary master of this stretch of the world, Qi Jingchun, of course, knew the full origins and history of Chen Ping'an's little family of three, and could reach back a thousand years, or ten thousand if it came to that. Even if he had never laid eyes on the boy's ancestors, he could deduce and project them well enough. The principle was simple: just as a county magistrate, if he truly wished to trace the heredity and lineage of the folk under his rule, had only to go to the census bureau that kept the household registers, consult the files, and see it all at a glance.
The town, after more than three thousand years of propagation and growth, had spread its branches beyond its own bounds, its roots tangled and interwoven. Because every generation had brought forth a few rare and brilliant figures, who, though unable to return home in honor, had nourished their families through secret channels, there had at last arisen the four surnames and ten clans now most flourishing in the town.
Chen Ping'an's family was likewise of ancient lineage. Its ancestors had once soared high and prospered handsomely. But after two wrenching reversals of fortune, amid the Baoping Continent, where petty kingdoms swarmed like fireflies and dynasties stood thick as a forest, it had gradually sunk into decline, yielding way to other surnames. Across a thousand years, like a great river draining lower and lower, it had fallen, until in the generation of the boy's father this branch of the Chen line had, in the whole of the Baoping Continent, rotted into its final ruin. And as for the borders of the Da Li dynasty, where the town lay — it was as though this house were an official whom the sovereign had decreed "shall not hold office, generation after generation," beyond all hope of restoration.
In the sixty-odd years since Qi Jingchun had come to preside over the great formation's workings, he had guarded strictly the four-character precept "upright, square, balanced, harmonious," and had never once altered the destiny of a single townsfolk by personal taste or whim. Otherwise, in the eyes of this scholar — who had once hated evil as he would an enemy — there was filth beyond measure in the great houses of the town's high gates, and poverty beyond count in the cramped little doors of its lanes. Yet after many years of cold-eyed watching, Qi Jingchun had come to see that the great names in their great mansions had their own futile helplessness, and the small households of the mean lanes their own desperate cruelty. As the years drew on, Qi Jingchun became like an idol hung high aloft: he enjoyed no incense, owed no human debts, and simply sat with hands folded in his sleeves, deaf and blind to the affairs of the world.
Qi Jingchun was mildly taken aback. He stepped forward, fixed his gaze, and nodded faintly. For all that the fierce, poor boy seemed bent upon this kill, resolved never to stop until Fu Nanhua lay dead, judging by the present pose he had struck, the boy would in the end only bring his wrist crashing down on Fu Nanhua's neck — a far kinder fate than Cai Jinjian had met. Fu Nanhua was to be sent by that heavy blow hurling sideways into the wall, whereupon the boy would seize his neck with one hand and press the porcelain shard against his belly with the other.
Qi Jingchun felt a flicker of curiosity. Why had the boy not struck to kill this time? A golden opportunity, gone in a blink, with no end of trouble to follow. Qi Jingchun was a true Confucian: he kept to the rites but would not cling to dead dogmas, no stodgy pedant swaying his head and rattling off book-lore. Of men of Fu Nanhua's breed he knew the type all too well — their aptitudes and roots, their temperaments and dispositions. Even if the boy's threat had forced Fu Nanhua, for the moment, to put aside his vengeance there in the lane, this affair would surely stand as the single, supreme humiliation of the young man's life — enough, carried to its height, to wrench his very dao-mind into madness. And when the settling of accounts with the boy came, it would not be Fu Nanhua alone who called; it would be the whole of Old Dragon City, lord of the southern sea.
Qi Jingchun had come to check the boy's unbroken streak of killing partly from private motive, but more for the sake of what was right. The town now was like a porcelain bowl with a crack in it, bound sooner or later to shatter apart. Qi Jingchun had to slow this course of the irresistible tide, to arrange escape routes for as many people as he could — best of all, to hand the charge over, safe and sound, to that blacksmith, Master Ruan, so that once the last cycle of sixty years had been weathered, all sides might, more or less, come out contented: those of the mountain gaining their chance, those beneath gaining their peace. One had only to consider the customary nature of the former, the vast majority — that at every point when a road crumbled, when the old gave way to the new, when fortunes spring up on every side and eternal life seemed within reach, a few hundred or a few thousand ants beneath the mountain's foot counted for nothing whatever in their eyes!
In this, the callous, loveless heart of a mortal dynasty's house seemed hardly worth mentioning next to the "impartiality of the great dao" that so many cultivators held in reverence.
Qi Jingchun pondered for a while, then quietly dissolved his form and vanished.
Heaven and earth resumed their flowing course, smooth and unimpeded.
The stall that had gripped that span of moments before — the deepest end — quietly shattered.
The boy's wrist "at last" crashed down heavily upon Fu Nanhua's neck. The latter's head lolled, and he was hurled sideways into the wall of the lane, knocked dizzy and senseless by the enormous force. Touching down, the boy closed in swift as lightning and drove an elbow into Fu Nanhua's belly.
Fu Nanhua never once managed to stand straight against the wall. The elbow struck him so hard he nearly retched up bitter water, and his body doubled over by sheer instinct.
With one hand the boy gripped Fu Nanhua by the neck, and with the other pressed the porcelain shard against the guts of this young master in his tall cap.
Fu Nanhua could hardly fathom how the lad, a full head shorter than himself and skinny to boot, commanded such monstrous strength in his fingers — and above all, the sharpness and cold of the porcelain against his belly made the young heir of Old Dragon City taste death's approach anew, a single breath separating the yin from the yang.
What Fu Nanhua could not know was how astonishing was the boundless potential that had burst forth from a child who, from his earliest years, had to scour the mountains and fields for herbs — potential set ablaze by an obsession far stronger than his own drive merely to survive.
When that boy, after swallowing a poisonous herb there in the lane, had writhed in agony upon the ground, that very obsession had been enough to make a child who ought by rights to be in the village schoolhouse think only of dragging himself home — crawling if he must — to set the bamboo basket of life-saving herbs safe within his own walls.
And after that, the felling of firewood, the burning of charcoal, the firing of porcelain, the pulling of clay, the digging of earth, the tasting of soil — there was not a single one of these tasks that did not test the boy's strength and endurance to the breaking point.
Beyond the town, Fu Nanhua could, with a single casual flourish of some immortal art, crush a hundred or a thousand boys like this without effort. But to choose to face him life-or-death within the town — why, that truly was luck run out to its very last, a foot kicked square against a sheet of iron.
Fu Nanhua, the double blow of agony and humiliation having clouded his wits, twisted his face into a snarl: "Kill me, and you're doomed all the same! Spare me, and death still hunts you down! Bastard whelp — either way, you're finished!"
Chen Ping'an raised his head slightly, fixing his eyes on this man whose face was wild with frenzy. "Understand this," he said. "I do not want to kill you. We have no grudge, no grievance between us. It was only because you meant to harm me that I raised my hand."
Fu Nanhua sneered: "A bastard whelp like you, to talk of reason with me, Fu Nanhua?!" He forced still more weight into his voice. "Are you worthy?!"
Chen Ping'an was silent for a moment, then asked, "Do you truly have to kill me?"
When Fu Nanhua saw the eyes in that dark-skinned boy's face, he abruptly grew calm.
With the grip about his neck, Fu Nanhua's face flushed crimson, then swiftly turned a deathly blue and shifted to purple. In truth the boy had not tightened his fingers by a hair, yet they were enough to choke a strapping young man to death.
Fu Nanhua forced out the words with difficulty: "If I say I won't kill you — will you believe me?"
He struggled violently once.
But the boy, almost in the same breath, tightened his hold, and the arm that Fu Nanhua had begun to stir slumped back down, listless.
Chen Ping'an shook his head.
Fu Nanhua grew ever more dizzy and light-headed. Though in his heart he wished nothing more than to crush this whelp's head with a single slap, on the surface he strove to keep a mild and pleasant countenance. "And what if I swear an oath to heaven? Men of our sort may not swear lightly."
Fu Nanhua had played a sly trick. It was true that for a Buddhist to voice a great vow, or a cultivator to take an oath upon his heart, carried a formidable binding force. But plainly Fu Nanhua had spoken only half the truth. Even if he swore, it would be only an oath upon his lips, zealously proclaimed — not that heavy, heart-knotted vow which, "though graven in no characters, was carved all the same into the chamber-wall of the heart's elixir." So whether he honored it afterward rested solely on his mood. Moreover, even a cultivator's heart-oath could be broken by some means or other; it was only a question of the scale of the price. By and large, that price bore an absolute relation to the height of the cultivator's realm and the weight of what had been sworn.
But to his astonishment, the straw-sandaled boy shook his head all the same.
Fu Nanhua, struggling more and more for breath, had lost the very spirit to haggle, and, for no discernible reason, a fog drifted over his senses.
Was he about to die?
Just like that pitiful wretch Cai Jinjian — and at the hands of this base bastard whelp, no less.
And when the dreadful tidings reached Old Dragon City, would the whole city make a jest of it?
He had not even had the chance to reach down and trigger the hidden mechanism of his jade belt. That white-jade belt about his waist was in truth the lingering remnant spirit of a subterranean dragon —
"It is enough."
A voice, like a sound falling from heaven, reached both their ears. To Fu Nanhua it was the very music of heaven — except that he happened to have swooned by then and could not be certain whether he had not merely imagined it.
Chen Ping'an turned his head in surprise.
And found a Master Qi all a-shimmer with whiteness, a drifting, insubstantial, disembodied figure.
The latter smiled without a word.
Chen Ping'an's eyes returned to their resolute firmness, and the fingers of his right hand never once relaxed.
Qi Jingchun showed neither the vexation of one whose good deed was taken for a donkey's liver, nor the satisfaction of one who beholds fine raw material. He merely flicked his sleeve lightly at the straw-sandaled boy, as though he were "ladling" some object into his palm.
The Confucian sage opened his hand and looked, and broke into a silent, startled laugh.
There lay a blob of filth, black as an inkblot.
It turned out that a certain man's planted intent upon the boy's person had long since faded and gone dark — plainly it had withered away and died long ago.
Lifting his gaze once more toward the boy Chen Ping'an, Qi Jingchun felt a stir of regret, and sighed: "Small wonder the Master said that, among those who accomplish things in this world, exceptional genius is but secondary — it is a will of adamant, unbending endurance that stands foremost. Chen Ping'an, you have taught me another lesson on the Master's behalf. What a shame that I, Qi Jingchun, no longer have the chance to take a final disciple."