"The Blink Sword Style?" Han Li repeated the name to himself, as though he could not quite believe his ears.
"Aye, even so. Now tell me, what hath a sword art to do with a blink of the eye? Is not that a laughable name for it?" Li Feiyu grinned, shaking his head at the absurdity of the thing.
"Hast thou ever practised this sword art?" Han Li asked, with a care that was almost solicitous.
"Not I. Who would ever practise a martial art that needs no true qi? Would that not be but an empty, painted show? And think not it is I alone who holds it in contempt—since the very day it was first devised, never a single man hath trained it to any success."
"Then how came so useless an art to rest within the Seven-Absolutes Hall at all?"
"Ah, that is the strangest tale of it," said Li Feiyu. "Had it not been for the elder who first created it—a man who rescued the Sect of Seven Mysteries from crisis not once but several times over—and had he not, on his deathbed, set it down as a dying wish that this sword art be placed within the collection of the Seven-Absolutes Hall, why, the Blink Sword Style would never have won a place among the peerless arts of that hall."
Li Feiyu was a man of contrary fashion: his face wore a cold and ruthless look, yet his tongue ran free. Han Li had scarce framed a question ere Li Feiyu had turned out every last secret of this strange art, root and branch. And yet this chattering nature showed itself but a little, and only in Han Li's presence. Abroad among the other disciples, he was again the cold, cool idol of theirs, the stern "Senior Brother Li" whom all looked up to from afar.
When Han Li had heard the whole account to the end, a certain feeling stirred within his breast—a vague, formless hint, rising from the depths of his being—which told him that this was, at last, the very thing he had been seeking all along.
"Senior Brother Li," he said at length, with a trembling of hope beneath his steady words, "canst thou copy out this sword art, and bear it forth from the Seven-Absolutes Hall for me?"
"Ha! Why, of course," returned Li Feiyu, waving a hand as though the matter were the merest trifle. "Were it any other art thou hadst asked for, I could not well transcribe it, for every day do diligent men inspect the library, and aught missing would be caught at once. But this Blink Sword Style lieth in a far and forgotten corner, where no living soul ever sets a lingering eye. The better way by far," and here his eyes sparkled, "is that I carry out the original manual itself to thee. When thou hast committed it to memory, or copied it out at thy leisure, I will slip it back again into its place, and never a single soul will be the wiser."
Han Li considered the matter a space. He could not deny the peril, yet the thought of the relentlessly marching days that bore down upon him left little room for caution—and weightier reason moved him still. He had half expected a copy drawn by another's hand, and had harboured a secret dread that Li Feiyu, in that careless, forgetful habit of his, might skip a stroke here and a stroke there in the copying; then all his pains would come to naught, and he none the wiser. But to have the very original before his eyes—that was better by far than any copy could be. And seeing how full of confidence his friend was, he said: "Good, then so be it. Let it be done as thou sayest."
"Then the matter is settled," said Li Feiyu, well pleased. "Come, the hour grows late, and I must be back to my training, else the master of the Seven-Absolutes Hall will discover that I have stolen abroad again."
He dried his body, donned his upper garment, and made ready to leave. Han Li said no more of it, but only charged him earnestly: "When thou takest the manual, be on thy guard. See thou dost not trip and fall upon this venture, for the cost of falling were heavy indeed."
Li Feiyu, careless as ever, turned his back upon him and waved a hand airily, as though the whole danger were a thing to be laughed away; and so, crawling slowly out through the nearby cavern, he vanished from the pool, swallowed up by the hidden tunnel.
Han Li watched his friend's dwindling back until it had quite disappeared. Then, little by little, the smile faded from his face, and in its place crept a gathering of dark clouds across his brow.
Not long after Li Feiyu had gone, Han Li returned to the Spirit Hands Valley. The moment he set foot within it, he spied from afar that tall, mysterious man who stood as ever in the same post. Motionless he stood, just without the door of Doctor Mo's dwelling, close at the threshold, the hood of his cloak drawn low, having no more care for the fierce glare of the summer sun than a stone has for the rain that beats upon it year in and year out.
Han Li halted at his own door, and stood there looking long upon this man who never spoke a single word. Ever since Doctor Mo had brought him to heel with threats, Han Li had been drawn by a strange curiosity to this fellow of hidden countenance, who seemed born a mute; since first he had come into the valley, not a syllable had ever passed his lips.
And stranger still was the man's stupendous strength of body. To stand thus stock-still was to him no more than a moment's ease; he could keep such a stand a whole day at a stretch, and Han Li had never once seen the weariness gather in his limbs. In his secret thoughts, Han Li had long ago dubbed him "the Monster." He had even tried, once or twice, to hold speech with him; but the fellow was as a block of wood, unmoved—whatever honeyed words or stirring tales Han Li poured out, the man had no more heed for them than a deaf wall of stone.
At last Han Li was thoroughly convinced of his defeat at Doctor Mo's hands; for here was a man of living flesh and blood, yet trained until he had become as a wooden puppet, without any weakness at all. This fellow, he knew, might well become yet another of Doctor Mo's hidden weapons; yet he was utterly helpless against him, for he could find not a single crack nor flaw in him to exploit. The one thing that unsettled him most was this: that sometimes, when he chanced to look upon the man's back from behind, a flicker of something familiar would pass over him, as though he had seen the selfsame shape of shoulders somewhere before. Yet ever when he forced his memory, he could not call to mind whose back it was that his recognition faintly resembled.
After watching a while, Han Li heaved a sigh, shut his door, and went back within; and, his mind a little troubled, he took a single swift leap that carried him clean upon his bed, lay there at full stretch, and, folding his hands behind his head, shut his eyes.
There in the stillness he ran over once more in his thoughts the moves he had learned that day from Li Feiyu, simulating them within his imagination, breaking down every stance into small parts and going over each until he had it fixed beyond forgetting.
This was the new power that the Art of Eternal Youth, carried up to its fifth layer, had conferred upon him: a memory that forgot nothing. By force of this advantage, he could commit any martial art whole to his mind, purely through his imagination, with never a gesture of hand or foot; then play it back within his thoughts a hundred times over, refining and distilling it until it grew sharper with every rehearing. This, too, was why Li Feiyu had taken him for a prodigy of genius.
It was two months ago that Han Li, aided by the might of his two sacred medicines, had burst through the fourth layer of the Art of Eternal Youth and attained the fifth. The potency of the Yellow Dragon Pill and the Golden Marrow Pellet had proved far greater than ever he had reckoned; he had made too small an account of the power locked within those few formulas, and these pills they produced were treasure beyond price. Yet those two wonder-drugs had likewise been spent in no small measure; little over half now remained. What was left should scarce suffice to see him through the sixth layer—and that prospect filled him with no little longing for what unexpected gift it might bring.
There were but half a year and less remaining before Doctor Mo's final ultimatum would fall due. It was true that he had learned a number of moves and stances from Li Feiyu; but because he had no matching internal true qi to lend them strength, they were, in the end, no more than the surface-trimming of a flower-display. Against a man with but a passing knowledge of the martial arts, such skill might well suffice; but to turn it against Doctor Mo himself—that would be as flinging a meat-dumpling before a dog: it would go, and never be seen again. At this thought Han Li felt both a pressing anxiety and a gnawing vexation. This Art of Eternal Youth of his—there was nothing wrong with it save only this: it could never be put to use in open combat, in the bloody give-and-take of a real fight.
He had now but one hope left to him, and that was the Blink Sword Style. Perhaps, he comforted himself, it would bring him at last the surprise he so desperately sought.