by Jin Yong
Seized with gloominess, Linghu Chong stood by the edge of the cliff and gazed at their receding figures until they turned around the shoulder of the pass. Soon, Yue Lingshan’s loud and clear singing wafted up the cliff from behind the mountain shoulder. It was a lively and smooth tune. Linghu Chong grew up together with Yue Lingshan and had listened to her singing for many times, but he had never heard of this tune before. Yue Lingshan had always been singing Shanxi53 folk songs – the kind that had a long ending sound that would be echoing around the valleys. But this one sounded more like water drops dripping down a fountain and each word was short and clear. Linghu Chong tried to listen to the lyrics, but could only hear something like “sisters, let’s go uphill to pick tea.” She had some odd pronunciations; Linghu Chong could hear the words, but he could only recognize probably the meaning of one out of ten words. He thought, “When did little apprentice sister learn this new song? It is a very pleasant song. I’ll have to ask her to sing this one again from the beginning next time when she comes up the cliff.”
Suddenly, he almost felt like a hammer had just smashed his chest as he realized, “This is a Fujian54 folk song. Apprentice brother Lin must have taught her this one!”
That night, Linghu Chong couldn’t sleep. Disquieting thoughts surged in his mind. It seemed as if Yue Lingshan’s lively but hard to understand singing still echoed around his ears. “Linghu Chong! You’ve always been so unrestrained and carefree before, but today you can’t even put aside your worry just because of a song. How can you still call yourself a true man?” he kept blaming himself.
Knowing very clearly that he shouldn’t be still thinking about it, but the Fujian folk song sang by Yue Lingshan kept wafting around his ears. Linghu Chong felt great pain in his heart. In frustration, he picked up his sword and chopped and slashed toward the rock wall like a mad man. Feeling a stream of inner energy rising from his abdomen, he thrust the sword out, the posture and the way he used his energy happened to be just like the move taught by Madam Yue – Unrivaled and Unmatched, The Thrust of Ning. With a piercing sound, the sword surprisingly went into the rock wall all the way to the sword handle.
Linghu Chong was astounded. He knew too well that no matter how quickly he had advanced his Kung Fu skills in the last several months, it would still be impossible for him to jab his sword into the rock wall all the way to the handle. That would require putting superb inner energy onto the sword blade so that the blade could be jabbed into a rock as if the rock was a rotten piece of wood. Even Master or Master-Wife wouldn’t have such magical skills. He stood there as if he was in a trance, then he pulled at the sword handle and drew the blade out when he suddenly realized from the feel with his hand: the rock wall was only a very thin layer of rock. It was empty after about two or three inches deep – there was a cave on the other side of the rock wall.
Linghu Chong’s mind was now filled with curiosity. He lifted his sword and thrust again. “Clank!” This time the long sword broke in half. It turned out that because he didn’t use enough inner energy, the sword couldn’t even penetrate a two or three inches thick layer of rock. He spilled out a couple swears and then picked up a big rock from outside the cave. This time he used all his might and threw the rock at the rock wall, which smashed the rock wall hard and produced some vague echoes from behind the rock wall – apparently there was quite some spacious room behind it. He smashed the rock against the rock wall once again, and this time with a loud bang, the rock went through the rock wall and landed on the floor in the other side. Loud bangs kept rising from the other end as the rock rolled on the floor.
The discovery of such a secret cave drove all his depression and worries completely out. He picked up another rock and started smashing again. Soon, a hole big enough for his head to go through appeared on the rock wall. He widened the hole some more and then climbed in with a lit torch. Inside was a narrow corridor kind of pathway. Suddenly, he broke into a cold sweat as he looked down. A skeleton lay still on the ground facing down right next to his feet. This scene was far from what Linghu Chong had expected.
He calmed himself down a bit and thought, “Could this be a tomb? But why would the skeleton lay on the floor facing down instead of lying facing up? And this narrow corridor doesn’t look like a tomb corridor either.”
He looked down at the skeleton again. The clothing on the skeleton had rotten into dusts. Two huge axes lay on the ground next to the skeleton, shining as they reflected the light from the torch. He picked one of the axes up. It was very heavy, at least over forty pounds. He raised the axe and chopped it at the rock wall by his side. “Clank!” A big chunk of rock was chopped off. He was stunned.
“This axe is too sharp to be a normal axe. It must have belonged to a senior master in the Martial World as his weapon.” The spot where the axe had just chopped by looked very smooth, almost as smooth as a Tofu Cube being cut by a knife, and there were many chop marks on all sides of the corridor. He thought about it for a short moment and was stunned by his conclusion. He walked down the path a bit more with the torch raised high, only finding axe chopping marks all over the cave. He found himself stupefied.
“So the pathway was actually made by chops from this man using his sharp axes. Right, he was taken prisoner in the middle of the mountain, so he tried to use his sharp axes to dig a way out of the mountain. But he fell short of success and died exhausted with only inches from breaking out. Alas, he was certainly very unfortunate.”
He walked about another one hundred feet and the pathway still did not end. He thought, “That man dug such a long pathway. Such strong will and determination together with his superb Kung Fu level must have been extraordinary.” He couldn’t help but feel great respect toward the mysterious man.
Some steps deeper down the path, two more skeletons appeared, one sitting down leaning against the wall, the other one huddled up and lay on the floor. “So there were actually more than one trapped in the middle of the mountain,” Linghu Cong figured. “But this is an important site of our Huashan Sword School; outsiders shouldn’t be able to have access here. Could all these skeletons be senior masters of our Huashan Sword School who violated school rules and were punished to die here?”
He walked another one hundred feet and followed the pathway when it swerved to the left. Suddenly, a huge cave, spacious enough to hold over a thousand people, appeared right in front of his eyes. There were seven more skeletons in the cave, some sitting down, some lying on the floor. All of them had weapons lying next to them. Among those weapons were a pair of iron plates, a pair of Judge-Pens, an iron staff, a copper club, a weapon that looked like a thunderbolt mace, a fanged tri-tip and double-blade halberd, and also some kind of a weapon that looked like a combination of knife and sword that he had never seen before.
“These people with those special weapons and the one using the axes couldn’t have been apprentices of our sword school,” he told himself.
Not far from where he stood, over a dozen long swords piled on the ground in disorder. He walked by and randomly picked one up. The sword was shorter than average but the blade had double the width of a regular sword; it was also much heavier. He thought, “This is the kind of sword used by the Taishan Sword School.” Among the rest of the swords, some were light and very flexible, which was the type of sword used by the Heng-Shan Sword School. Some had crooked blade and were among one of the three types of swords used by the Hengshan Sword School. Some had very blunt edges and a very sharp tip, which was the type of popular weapon used by some senior masters from the Songshan Sword School. There were also three swords that had the same length and weight of a regular Huashan style sword. More and more questions popped out in his head, “Why is there a pile of weapons from the Five Mountains Sword Alliance?”
Linghu Cong raised the torch high and looked around the walls of the cave. There was a big rock sticking out dozens of feet above the ground from the rock wall on the right side. It looked like a platform. Underneath the big rock, some
words were carved onto the rock wall in large fonts, saying “THE FIVE MOUNTAINS SWORD ALLIANCE, YOU SHAMELESS AND DESPICABLE BUNCH, CAN’T WIN IN A FAIR FIGHT, DIRTY TRICKS ARE YOUR SPECIALTY.” There were a total of four lines of words and each character was about a foot tall. The strokes went inches into the rock. Obviously they were carved in with a very sharp blade. All the words were written in a bold and tense hand, with strokes extending in all directions. Then he noticed many smaller characters carved next to the huge characters with words like “dirty scoundrel”, “ignominious cowards”, “filthy pigs”, and “incompetent chickens” etc. All of them were cursing or swearing words.
The more Linghu Chong read, the angrier he became. “So all those people were prisoners of our Five Mountains Sword Alliance. They were all completely irritated, but had no other way of venting their anger, so had to carve those words onto the rock wall. I’d say what they did was the real shameless and despicable thing. But I wonder who would they be? If they were enemies of the Five Mountains Sword Alliance, then they mustn’t be good.”
He looked at the rock wall again and saw a line of words that read, “Fan Song and Zhao He defeat Heng-Shan sword art here.” Right next to the text, there were many sketches of human forms drawn in pairs, one wielding a sword and the other wielding an axe. After a quick count, Linghu Chong estimated that there were at least five or six hundred of sketch drawings. Apparently the axe wielding one was countering the sword wielding one’s sword art forms. By the side of those human form drawings, there was another line of words saying, “Zhang Chengyun and Zhang Chengfeng defeat all Huashan sword art here.”
Linghu Chong was furious. “You shameless scoundrels, how wildly presumptuous you are! Huashan style sword art is meticulous and profound. There is very few in the world that can actually block it; who would have dared claiming to be able to not only “defeat”, but “defeat all” of the Huashan sword art?” he thought.
He picked up the heavy sword of the Taishan Sword School and smacked it hard against the line of text. With a loud bang and a shower of sparks, he smacked a part of the word “all” off. But from the smacking, he realized that the rock belonged to a very hard type, and even with sharp blades, it would still be very difficult to draw sketches or write on the rock wall.
He looked more closely and saw a drawing by the line of text. The sword wielding man were drawn with only a few simple and crude lines, but from the posture he could tell that it was one of the moves in the basic sword form of the Huashan sword art called Graceful Phoenix. In the move, the sword would be dancing with lithe and graceful movements. The countering human shape was wielding a straight line shaped weapon that could have been either a staff or a spear, with the tip of the weapon pointing directly at the swordsman’s sword tip, looking very clumsy.
Linghu Chong sneered. “The Graceful Phoenix move of Huashan has five additional hidden techniques. How could it ever be defeated by such a clumsy move?”
But when he looked at posture of the man in the drawing again, out of the dullness, there seemed to have more continuous flow in it. Although the move Graceful Phoenix had five additional techniques, but the staff move seemed to faintly have six or seven additional techniques, more than enough to counter the various techniques from the Graceful Phoenix move.
His eyes fixing on the quick drawn human sketch, Linghu Chong was dumbfounded. “This Graceful Phoenix move of our sword school looks like an ordinary move, but the additional techniques hold great power. A smart opponent would have simply blocked it and dodged aside. If he had tried to counter it, he would be suffering great losses. But that staff move in the drawing really can defeat the Graceful Phoenix move of ours. That…that…that….” Gradually, his astonishment transformed into admiration. Deep in his heart, he also felt great terror.
He stared blankly at the two human sketches, lost in thought and time completely forgotten. Suddenly, a great pain came from his right hand and woke him. It turned out to be the torch, which had burned almost to the end and the flame caught his hand. He threw it down, thinking, “It’s going to be completely dark if the torch burns down.” So he rushed to the front cave, took over a dozen of the pine branches that were meant to be firewood for heating purposes, and then returned to the back cave in a dash.
He lit a pine stick from the about to extinguish torch and gazed at those two human shape sketches again, thinking, “If the staff wielding guy has the same level of Kung Fu as the swordsman from our sword school, then the swordsman might incur some serious injury. If the opponent has slightly better Kung Fu, then when the two moves clashes, the swordsman will see his own life perishing in front of his own eyes within the time of a flash. That Graceful Phoenix move of ours…has truly been defeated by the staff wielding man and has been rendered useless!”
He turned a little and started studying the second group of drawings and soon recognized that the swordsman was using a Huashan move called Green Pines Welcoming Guests. He immediately felt his spirits buoyed up. When he had learned that move in the old days, it had taken him a full month to be able to execute it proficiently. That move had become one of his favorite killer moves. Feeling excited yet slightly frightened, fearing that this move might be defeated again, he looked at the staff wielding man drawing. But to his surprise, he saw five staffs in the man’s hand striking toward five different parts of the swordsman’s lower body.
“Why does he have five staffs?” he pondered.
After looking at the staff wielding man’s posture some more he understood it. “These aren’t five staffs. He is striking out five times quickly in one instant to hit five of the opponent’s lower body. But if he’s fast, I can be fast too. He might not be able to strike out five times fast enough. So this Green Pines Welcoming Guests can’t be defeated after all.”
Just when he was feeling great, he suddenly realized, “He is not striking out with his staff five times. He could have struck out in any one of the five positions, and how would I dodge that?”
He picked up one of the Huashan style sword and performed the move Green Pines Welcoming Guests. Then he studied the drawings carefully and imagined in his head how the opponent would have struck out with his staff. He figured that since he already knew where the staff would be striking to, he should be able to figure out a counter. But when that staff struck out from any one of the five positions, his sword would have been fully thrust out with no chance of withdrawing it back in time. Unless the thrust could kill the opponent, otherwise his lower body would for sure get hit. And the opponent most likely would be a skilled fighter, how could one expect to kill the opponent with one single thrust? And with the sliding posture and a lowered shoulder in the drawing, the enemy for sure would be able to dodge the thrust in that fraction of time. Once the enemy dodged the sword thrust and struck back, he would have no chance to evade. Thus, the unique Huashan move of Green Pines Welcoming Guests had been defeated as well.
Linghu Chong remembered that he had won three times in various fights using that move of Green Pines Welcoming Guests. If his opponents had seen the drawing on the rock wall before, and knew how to counter attack, then it wouldn’t matter whether the opponent had used a staff or a spear, he would have either get wounded or get killed. Probably there wouldn’t even be a Linghu Chong left in the world today.
The more he thought about it, the more terrified he became. He murmured to himself as cold sweat streamed down his forehead, “That’s impossible! That’s impossible! If the move Green Pines Welcoming Guests could be defeated this way, how come Master knows nothing about it? Why didn’t he ever warn me about it?” He knows all the key aspect of that move from inside out, so he knew to the full extent how detrimental those five staff strikes were. Although those were just five short lines on the rock wall, he could almost feel every strike smacking heavily onto his ankles and shins.
Linghu Chong looked on. The sword moves carved onto the rock wall were all unique moves of the Huashan Sword School, and the opponent always had ultra-c
lever and vicious moves that would defeat them. The more moves he checked out, the more he gasped, until a move called Boundless Falling Leaves. The enemy’s staff move against this one appeared to be very weak and powerless. The entire counter move had taken the defending initiative. Linghu Chong heaved a long sigh of relieve, thinking, “There’s finally one you can’t defeat!”
He remembered a scene in January last year. It snowed that day. Countless of snowflakes swirled in the air. Master was in a very good mood. He gathered the apprentices for a sword art lesson. At the end of the lesson, he demonstrated the move Boundless Falling Leaves. His every thrust became even faster than the previous one and every thrust hit a swirling snowflake in the air. Even Master-Wife applauded and cheered, saying, “Apprentice brother, I am convinced from this move that you are qualified to be the Head Master of the Huashan Sword School.” Master answered with a smile, “It takes moral integrity, not shear power to lead the Huashan Sword School. It’s not necessary that with just one proficient move, someone would become qualified for the post of Head Master.” Master-Wife rebuffed in a grin, “Hey, aren’t you ashamed? What moral integrity of yours is better than mine?” Master smiled and did not argue. Master-Wife seldom submitted to other’s Kung Fu and loved to compete with Master. Even she had to admit her admiration that time, so it was obvious that the move Boundless Falling Leaves was a superior move. Master explained about the move later. The name of the move came from a poem and the poem had a line saying something like “boundless falling leaves”. Master had recited it at the time, but Linghu Chong couldn’t remember it. It seemed to be describing how leaves from thousands of trees had fallen and swirled in the air in all directions. That was why this sword move needed to cover all directions.
Looking at the staff wielding human sketch, he found a human shape drawing huddled himself up in a rather unsightly posture that looked as if he had no way of avoiding a good beating. Linghu Chong was about to laugh out loud when his smile suddenly froze. He felt a chill run down his back and the fine hairs on his back almost all stood up. He gazed at the staff in the man’s hand on the sketch without blinking. The more he gazed at it, the more he felt that the staff was at an ingenious position. All the nine thrusts, ten thrusts, eleven thrusts, or twelve thrusts…out of the move Boundless Falling Leaves would inevitably land on the staff. The position of the staff appeared to be dull when one first looked at it, but was actually very clever; the staff move appeared to be very weak, yet it was actually extremely strong. The move really had attained the lofty realm of martial arts that is to “counter motion with standstill and defy cleverness with dullness.”