The voice of the second spy was a stranger to Han Li. As far as he knew, he had never set eyes upon the man; but to judge by the sound of it, he was young of years, likely in his twenties.
More's the pity, out of caution Han Li had not dared to snatch even a single covert glance at them, lest these two should be possessed of pure, refined skill and, sensing the watchfulness of another's gaze, discover that there was an outsider lurking near at hand. That would not have been worth the bargain.
After this affair had passed, the road ahead proved altogether peaceful.
Han Li finally returned to his quarters only long after the hour of the evening meal had come and gone.
As was ever his wont, Doctor Mo had not the least curiosity to cast even a single glance toward Han Li's mysterious comings and goings. Save that he now and again sent round his prepared medicines, he left Han Li wholly to his own free will in all his conduct and manner.
Had Han Li not observed that the medicines Doctor Mo sent him were all prepared from those precious herbs he had himself gathered on his descent from the mountain the time before, he might well have thought the man had given up all hope of him and was even now hatching some venomous plot the while.
As things stood, Han Li had come to set no value whatsoever upon those so-called precious medicines of Doctor Mo's sending. Yet, lest the man take note, he would still pinch his nose and swallow them down.
He was not afraid that the medicines sent him might be laced with poison; for if the man were to harm him now, he would be harming himself to an equal degree.
As for those spies of the Wild Wolf Gang he had met mid-road, Han Li had already, on his way back, hit upon a fitting way to deal with them.
He himself, to be sure, cherished no very deep affection for the Sect of Seven Mysteries; yet still and all he was, in a manner of speaking, half an inner disciple, and it would ill become him to stand by with folded arms and take not the least heed of a harm so plainly threatening the sect beneath his very nose.
The more so as he had long since found out the fittest man of all to handle this matter for him—Li Feiyu, Senior Brother Li.
From Han Li's observation, perhaps by dint of swallowing the Marrow-Draining Pill, Li Feiyu's appetite for fame and gain had grown far heavier than is common in men. A goodly ambition stirred within him; he had ever dreamt of entering the high councils of the Sect of Seven Mysteries, and of becoming a figure yet more conspicuous in the eyes of all.
Han Li had sometimes guessed that the fellow, having but a few years left to him, was minded to use that final span to make himself yet wilder, yet more splendid still.
And now, if Han Li were to deliver so great a merit into his hands of his own accord, he doubted not that the man would caper for very joy. This, too, would be a way of repaying the great debt he owed for the obtaining of the sword manuals.
And at the very mention of the Blink Sword Manuals, Han Li's heart was shaken by wave upon wave of a thrilling excitement.
Of the matter of the Blink Sword Manuals, he had not lied to his friend; it was true indeed that those manuals were not fitted to the other's practice. Yet of not a few of the details, Han Li had kept his own counsel.
For him, to retain in every man's presence some small secret of his own was the one and only rule by which he could go on living. Even when the man beside him seemed bound to him in close friendship and kept nothing hid, it was in no wise to be excepted.
Yet after all, that which was set down in these secret books was in very truth a thing most unlike the common run of martial art.
In Han Li's eyes, it would be better named not a sword-art but a sword-craft. For it was in its whole being a secret, murderous art that blended the favor of heaven, the advantage of the ground, and the accord of men, and was a pure and quite uncommon killing-skill, of the sort that struck once, and where it struck, slew.
These books described, over and again, the manifold arts by which, in differing places and at differing hours, a man might turn to account his own weird sword-craft, so hardly practiced, and slay his enemy with a single stroke.
They taught him who would learn this sword-craft to borrow every blade of grass and every tree of the very ground on which he stood, and the shifting angles of every ray of light, to work a delusion upon the sight of his foe; and then, in the turn of an eyelid, to seize upon the weakness of the enemy, to spy out his unguarded gap, and in the same instant to strike him dead.
It was a secret craft that set great store upon mere skill and subtlety; and without an ounce of native talent, a man could never hope to comprehend and master this sword-art to the full.
So it was that whoso would practice this secret craft must be a man of the surpassing five senses, whose sight and hearing far outran the common run of men, ere there was any hope of bringing it to success.
Were these conditions alone, there would be nothing more to say of it; there would ever be some disciple who, greedy for its terrible puissance, would choose to study it.
But here was the rub: it laid down yet more stringent conditions still. It required that whoso practiced it must carry no pure and refined internal true qi about his person; for were he to do so, the art would clash with the very arts of exerting force and loosing strokes, and progress would be made monstrous difficult.
And even should one by luck get through this trial and succeed, yet in actual combat, because one's true qi ran over-strong within the body, the sword-strokes would, all unawares, be warped and deformed thereby, leaving no small gap for the enemy to exploit, and so bring down upon one's head a lethal disaster.
Such a condition as this all but cut off the designs of every man who might be minded to practice the art. For it must be known that in the jianghu there ran the old proverb: "If thou train thy fists but not thy force, in the end it shall all come to naught."
To such men, to refrain from cultivating their internal force was an enormity beyond all else. To cast away the cultivation of one's own true qi for the sake of this obscure and unmoted sword-art—why, that would make one the very laughingstock of all the jianghu.
And so there remained but a scant few men who still held any intent to go on with its practice.
But even for these few, let them be ever so gifted, and let their true qi be in no wise deficient, there was yet one last obstacle left standing in the way, which utterly beat down their thought of pressing on.
And that was the sheer vastness and intricacy of this sword-craft's forms, and the over-nice, over-elaborate conditions laid upon the putting of them to use.
Look but at that great pile of thick manuals in his bundle, and any ordinary man was enough to be dismayed at the very sight.
In the main, each sword manual stood for a single sword-stroke; and every sword-stroke was in turn split up into a hundred sub-strokes; and every sub-stroke again must be practiced with this or that differing art, according as the place differed and the hour differed, in the putting of it to use.
At a body of sword-craft so vast, no need even to speak of practicing it; the mere reading of it would be enough to make a man's head ache, let alone the whole of it having to be committed to memory, and then worked out for oneself by understanding, and put into practice.
These outrageous conditions of cultivation had turned aside no man knows how many disciples who might honestly have wished to learn this sword-art, and made them curse within their hearts at that elder who had devised it. And as the years slid past, the Sect of Seven Mysteries, high and low alike, gradually lost all further interest in the art, thinking it beyond all possibility that any man should ever bring it to success, and fancying this whole body of martial learning likely no more than some idle fabrication spun out of thin air by that elder on his deathbed. For why else, they reasoned, should its conditions of practice be so far out of all reason? This was plainly nothing but a snare to catch those disciples who knew not its true worth. And so these manuals were laid up in their high places, shut away from all, and no man ever came again to turn to them.