Doctor Mo was well pleased that Han Li could devote all his time to cultivation.
Still, he found Han Li's progress in the Nameless Formula too slow.
In recent years, the illness upon Doctor Mo seemed to have grown graver. Each day his coughing grew more frequent, and each bout went on for longer.
As his body deteriorated, Doctor Mo seemed to grow all the more attentive to Han Li's progress. From the running urgency in his repeated urging, one could hear the fretfulness within.
Doctor Mo evidently prized Han Li very highly. Not only did he pay him far more silver than the ordinary disciples, as had been agreed, but the look he turned upon him at ordinary times was most peculiar, as though he were gazing upon some rare treasure, cherishing it with all his might.
Yet Han Li, now that his Formula had reached the third level, had grown most keen of sense, and he could not help noticing that behind all those kind and caring looks there occasionally mingled some trace of a greed and longing that made him uneasy.
Those expressions made Han Li's skin crawl. He always felt that the Doctor Mo who gave play to such looks was not looking at him as at a living man, but as at a thing.
This puzzled him a little. What could he possibly have that Doctor Mo should covet?
Of course there was nothing—so he answered himself with certainty.
At times Han Li even thought he had grown oversensitive from all his practice, and privately chided himself for slandering Doctor Mo, for being ungrateful to his benefactor.
And yet, he could not have said why, but in the most hidden recess of his heart he had still kept a measure of wariness toward Doctor Mo, and as time wore on that wariness only grew stronger.
Now a serious problem stood before Han Li: he had hit a bottleneck in his cultivation. Worse still, with all his years of exhausting practice and heavy dosing of medicines, the precious drugs in Doctor Mo's keeping had been used up to the very last.
It was plain that Han Li was no heaven-blessed genius, and without the aid of medicines his cultivation ground to a complete halt.
This made Han Li thoroughly ashamed to face Doctor Mo.
Doctor Mo had lavished nearly all his heart's blood and all his possessions upon him, creating for him the finest conditions for cultivation, and yet Han Li could not satisfy his demands.
Han Li felt he could hardly face Doctor Mo, face those ever-eager questions of his.
Strangely, for reasons unknown, Doctor Mo, despite his formidable martial arts, could not discern the fine details of Han Li's cultivation. His pulse-taking could reveal only a little of Han Li's progress, and so through all these days he had had no idea of the difficulty before his pupil.
Not long ago, Han Li, uneasy at heart, had at last frankly told Doctor Mo of his state.
When Doctor Mo heard that Han Li had made no progress in the Formula for a whole year, his sallow complexion turned faintly pale, and his already expressionless face grew all the more sour.
Doctor Mo did not reproach him. He only told him that he would be going down the mountain for a time, to gather some medicinal herbs, and bade him keep hard at his practice on the mountain and not slacken in his cultivation of the Formula.
Two days later, bearing his baggage and his implements for gathering herbs, Doctor Mo left the Sect of Seven Mysteries alone.
After he was gone, only Han Li remained in all of Spirit Hands Valley.
The other senior brother and close friend, Zhang Tie, had vanished all at once two years before, upon mastering the third level of the Elephant-Armor Art. He had left behind only a letter of farewell, saying he was going off to make a name for himself in the jianghu, and this had stirred up quite a storm throughout the Sect of Seven Mysteries. Later it was said that Doctor Mo had stepped forward to plead on his behalf, which spared his recommender and his kin from being dragged into trouble. So sudden a departure saddened Han Li for several days, and when he thought it over by and by, he vaguely felt something amiss—but he was young and his word carried no weight, nobody questioned him, and so the matter was left at that. Later Han Li guessed that Zhang Tie, frightened of undertaking the fourth level of the Elephant-Armor Art, had perhaps sneaked away unnoticed.
After some days of practicing within the valley, seeing no improvement, and being of a boyish temper besides, Han Li stepped out of Spirit Hands Valley and wandered about the Caixia Mountain Range.
Walking these mountain paths, so familiar and yet in some ways strange, Han Li felt a faint stirring of emotion.
In all these years, to devote himself to cultivation, Han Li had been as confined as a prisoner, never once stepping beyond the little valley.
The fellow disciples outside had long since forgotten, he reckoned, that such a senior brother as Han Li even existed.
Along the way he met some disciples patrolling the mountain, and seeing his sect robes but a face they did not know, they came up warily to interrogate him; it cost him a deal of explaining before he at last got free of them.
To avoid needless trouble, Han Li struck out only along the narrow goat trails, making for out-of-the-way places and shunning the crowded spots where tongues wagged.
True enough, along the way there were no more of those vexing interrogations, and he strolled on ever farther, free and easy.
Gazing upon scenery unlike anything within the valley, listening to the chattering calls of all manner of small birds, Han Li cast every worry to the back of his mind.
Then, all of a sudden, from beneath a quite hidden cliff, there came muffled the clashing of weapons, alongside a great many voices of men cursing and cheering on.
So out-of-the-way a place! So many people gathered together there! And such fiery, uproarious sounds!
Stirred by curiosity, Han Li no longer feared being questioned. Chasing after the sound of combat, he made his way to the vicinity of that cliff.
What a sight to behold! He could not help standing dumbfounded for a moment, taken quite aback.
Beneath that cliff, wholly screened by trees, no fewer than a hundred-odd people had gathered, so many that they packed the rather small space to bursting. Even in a few of the larger trees nearby, several people were standing upon the branches, gazing out.
Within the ring formed by all those people, two bands were pitted against each other in naked hostility.
The group on the left was the larger, with as many as eleven or twelve; the group on the right was the smaller, with only six or seven.
Han Li noticed that all of them, whether among the onlookers or the ones standing in the ring, were roughly his own age, mere lads in their teens.
A glimmer of a smile stole across Han Li's face. What a coincidence!
Among all these people he recognized with ease several familiar old faces.
"Wan Jinbao, Zhang Dalu, Ma Yun, Sun Lisong... huh! Wang Dapang is rounder than ever, and no wonder, with his family selling food—he eats well and it shows! Now this one here is, it's Liu Tietou, tsk, tsk—the scrawny little hot-potato face of old has turned into a fair and handsome young man!" Han Li, too, had scrambled up a tree and was running through a pointed roll-call of the familiar faces below.