As they pass by the tree where the carriage had been stopped earlier, Duan Ling reaches out to check the coachman’s carotid artery for a pulse. Thankfully he’s still breathing, and only lost consciousness. Duan Ling pulls the coachman to a sitting position behind the tree, but Wu Du has already gone on to scout ahead.
“Wait … wait a second!” Duan Ling chases after Wu Du, half out of breath as he tries to catch up. In a few steps Wu Du makes his way onto a tree; Duan Ling takes a running leap onto the side of one tree, then using it as a springboard, he leaps onto the top of another tree.
Wu Du looks carefully at the distant plains, trying to find any sign of their enemies, but within the short timespan between their escape earlier and now, the bandits had already gone without a trace.
“Damn it.” Wu Du says, “Everything’s been stolen.”
Duan Ling stares at him, unsure what to do.
Wu Du turns his head to look at Duan Ling, and it suddenly occurs to him how odd this is.
“How’d you get up here?” He asks.
Duan Ling nearly falls right off, and Wu Du hurriedly grabs him. He’s got to hand it to Wu Du for thinking of that now.
“Both the map and the letter are in the carriage,” Duan Ling says.
This is going to take so much work to fix. Duan Ling returns to the clearing and picks up a set of bow and quiver that the bandits have left behind, and tries it. The Tangut bow is too roughly made and hard on his skin, but he can use it in a pinch. Wu Du says with astonishment, “You know how to use a bow too?”
“I’ve had some training,” Duan Ling says, thinking to himself if you ever find out who I learned wall-hopping from, I’m guessing you’ll die of a heart attack.
Wu Du looks full of misgivings, and so Duan Ling makes up a vague lie to deceive him.
“How on earth did you jump up there just now?” But Wu Du still won’t give up, pressing Duan Ling for more details.
“I climbed up there! Must you try to clear up how I got up there right this moment? Let’s go find the carriage already!”
Firelight flickers in the distance, and Wu Du looks up again to find several owls flying off in a northeasterly direction.
“They’re probably over there.” Wu Du pauses to think, then says to Duan Ling, “Why don’t I first bring you to …”
Where would he bring him? Wu Du can’t exactly leave Duan Ling in the middle of nowhere, and they have an unconscious coachman to care for as well. While the two of them are still at a loss, they hear someone yelling from farther away, “Help —”
“Help!”
Wu Du frowns a little, and their eyes meet. Neither believe that it’s likely to be a trap, and so Wu Du heads over there through the wilderness on foot. They find a middle-aged man shouting, “Somebody help! Help!”
Duan Ling nocks an arrow and points it at him, but the man drops to the ground before them, breathing hard.
“Mercy! Mercy!”
The man is sweating profusely and a bit confused; Wu Du observes him for a moment, and shaking his lighter to activate it, he ignites a tree branch and shines its light onto the man’s face.2
What’s a person doing here in the middle of nowhere?
“My lady … has been taken by mounted bandits! Who are you people? Please do a good deed and save her!”
Everything is starting to make sense to Duan Ling now — the bandits must have taken the wrong carriage!
“And who is your lady exactly?” Wu Du frowns, looking the man up and down. Suddenly sensing danger, the man dares say no more.
“She’s … she’s … my lady’s come to visit her relatives,” the man prevaricates.
“You look after this old gentleman.” Duan Ling points to the unconscious coachman beneath the tree. “We’ll go find her.”
“You two are …”
Duan Ling waves off any more questions and turns to go. Wu Du says, “Hey! Wait!”
“I understand now,” Duan Ling says, “the one those bandits were hoping to ambush wasn’t us.”
Now that Duan Ling has reminded him, it becomes clear to Wu Du as well. “That is way too much of a coincidence.”
These bandits had to have been lying in wait in order to hit them without warning like that, so they must have been planning the attack for a while. When they were blurting out things in Tangut, they’d probably figured out that something wasn’t right since they didn’t see the one they were looking for, but they also suspected that it may have been a trick and that’s why they advanced on Duan Ling and Wu Du so aggressively. But why did they take the carriage too?
It’s truly a cliché to meet bandits on the road and end up rescuing maidens in distress, but that seems to be their lot. Wu Du and Duan Ling trace the bandits along the road and find the carriage tracks extending into the wheat fields. By now it’s nearing dawn, and Duan Ling never does manage to catch up to Wu du; he’s always a bit behind him, alternating between running and resting.
Finally, Wu Do can take it no more. “Just go on back!”
“I can’t find my way back anymore!” Duan Ling says, panting.
Wu Du stares at him, speechless.
There’s nothing but mountains aside from plains around these parts. When they started running, it was still night time, and as day breaks the entire world has practically transformed. After running for two full hours, if he thinks Duan Ling can find his way back he can go ahead and dream on!
Wu Du has no choice but to slow down. He looks around and realises that the carriage’s tracks end here. There’s a rocky strand across the way and the plains is covered in a thick fog just before dawn, and one can barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach away.
“The one those Tangut bandits wanted to kidnap was a rich young lady.” Duan Ling walks over to the stream, and leans back against a rock to rest for a bit. “They just got the wrong person, and thought our carriage was their target.”
Wu Du still doesn’t have a shirt on. Their clothes are in the carriage, and all he has on him is the towel he’s holding and the belt hanging at his waist. He straightens up to look over the stream, and the sound of water splashing is coming from a distance away. Duan Ling is about to say something more, but Wu Du has dropped to all fours, turning his ear to the ground, listening for the noises transmitted through the ground. “Shh,” he says, telling Duan Ling not to say anything. Then he carefully wades across the stream before turning around to beckon Duan Ling over to have a look.
Their carriage is stopped right there in a clearing beneath the waterfall, with several bandits standing guard outside, groaning and moaning as they spread ointment on each other’s necks. There’s a mountain cave a little farther in.
The sky faintly glows with first light; the mountain cave looks like a make-shift encampment put together last minute, with a lamp hanging inside, and there seems to be a few people sitting on the floor.
“Can you knock them all out in one go?” Duan Ling asks Wu Du.
“The ones outside, sure. Not the ones inside the cave though. I’ll have to use poison twice. But I don’t have anything on me right now, just this belt, and the powder inside is nearly gone. It’s only good for one use. As for the ones that are left … all I can do is kill them.”
“Then let’s lure them out first.”
Behind a tree, Duan Ling draws a rough map in the dirt and formulates a plan with Wu Du.
“Then you … get the stuff, and I’ll leave the rest in your hands.” Duan Ling looks at Wu Du, waiting for approval.
Wu Du gives it some thought, nods once, but then he turns to stare at Duan Ling.
“What?” Duan Ling asks.
“You’ve got a lot of guts. Who taught you all this stuff?”
Duan Ling is about to start stalling, but Wu Du is saying to him, “There’s no time to lose. Let’s go.”
They split up. Duan Ling takes a deep breath, draws the bow, and takes a test shot. He’s not as steady as he used to be, but he’s not entirely out of practice either. The Tangut iron bow may be powerful and exhausting to use, but he can shoot quite a distance with it.
Out in the forest, Wu Du melts into the shadows with his hands on his knees, keeping low to the ground, waiting. He turns his head to glance at Duan Ling.
Inside the mountain cave the lamp is casting a dim glow; the light whistling of an arrow cuts through the air and flies nearly fifty steps into the cave, then an arrow slices through the rope attached to the lamp. Before the bandits can react, the bowl of the oil lamp has smashed into the ground, and flames ignite the spreading fat, setting flames raging along the ground.
Those inside the cave immediately cry out, and at the noise the guards outside charge in to find out what’s happening. Those charging out and those charging in smash into each other, with the bandits inside pushing the guards aside as they rush out. Duan Ling quickly fires off another arrow. The alert bandit chief dodges out of the way and the arrow hits him in the leg.
Realising that they’re under attack, the bandit chief howls with rage, and thus begins an utterly chaotic battle where the enemy’s nowhere to be found. This whole time, Wu Du has remained upwind in the forest, waiting, and now he gracefully fans his lighter aflame, igniting several dry leaves laden with a powdered drug to produce a light, nearly invisible blue smoke that curls through the air as they drift towards the clearing.
The bandit at the front of the charging group drops to the ground; Duan Ling fires off more arrows as he backs away, watching the bandits charge out of the cave and falling onto their faces the moment they get outside. By now Wu Du has already dodged in front of the carriage and hopped inside.
Duan Ling has underestimated how many bandits there are; to his surprise nearly forty people have poured out of this tiny little mountain cave. Just as the other party discovers his hiding spot, WuDu whistles, and with Lieguangjian in hand, and still shirtless, carrying nothing but his sword case on his back, he dashes out of the back of the carriage.
As soon as Wu Du lets Duan Ling know he’s got his stuff, he quickly spreads his hands apart and an array of darts fly from his fingers, nailing the bandits to the ground.
Duan Ling hurriedly puts away the bow, and stooping to stay behind the bushes, he approaches the cave beneath the waterfall. He sees Wu Du leaps onto the carriage’s roof once more, blowing a long, winding whistle as if he’s challenging the bandits. The bandits are angered immediately, and they nock their arrows to fire at him. But instead of meeting them head on, Wu Du retreats behind the carriage, and with a flip-kick the carriage shaft goes flying out — the heavy, twenty-catty worth of carriage shaft at once flattening those bandits running at him.
Covering his nose and mouth with a wet cloth, Duan Ling runs into the cave. It’s quite roomy in there, and he can hear someone coughing violently farther in — a girl’s cough. Black smoke flies in Duan Ling’s face so he can’t tell which way is which. He grabs the girl’s hand, slices through the rope tied around her with the dagger, and pulls her up with him.
“Run!” Duan Ling covers her face with the wet cloth, and takes out of the cave as quickly as he can.
They leave the cave. Wu Du’s sword rises and falls as he weaves through the bandits, and soon enough he’s knocked out a bunch of them.
Duan Ling manages to steal a horse, and he helps the girl onto it.
“Go ahead of me!” Wu Du calls out.
Duan Ling leaves with the girl and spurs the horse on, soaring past the stream to dash deeper into the forest.
“Who are you?” The girl asks.
Duan Ling turns around to ask, “Who are you?!”
He only pulls at the reins to call the horse to a halt once they’ve covered more distance, and they’re reached a deeper part of the forest. Duan Ling looks back behind him, hesitating if he should go back to get Wu Du, but since Wu Du has told him to leave first he’s probably going to be just fine.
“Who are you?” The girl asks again. “What’s your surname? You’re Han, right? Not Tangut?”
Only now does Duan Ling take notice of the girl. Both their faces are smoked black and patchy like a couple of calico cats, and when Duan Ling sees her face he can’t help but burst out laughing. The girl stares at him awkwardly, unsure what to do when she doesn’t get an answer.
“Let me think, which way …” Duan Ling says, “We’ll have to meet up with him first.”
As he finishes speaking there’s a noise from a long way away as though someone is approaching. Duan Ling says, “Wu Du?”
“Wu Du?” The girl asks.
“Shh.” Sensing danger, Duan Ling reaches into the quiver to find that he has one last arrow. He takes aim at the depths of the forest; suddenly, a scream comes out of the woods, surprising both of them.
Right after the scream, the footsteps gradually recede until they fade away.
Duan Ling stares off silently, wondering what just happened.
He puts the arrow down slowly, and comes to a realisation that this is the real entrance to the bandit camp! Right where the noise came from earlier, there was a sentry post. The path he’s taken with Wu Du previously is actually behind the camp.
Duan Ling turns the horse around then, and charges into the deepest part of the forest until they’re through to the other side, and he only spurs the horse to a gallop into the wheat fields once they’re in the open. The sun’s been out for a while now, and on the boundless fields he can see the highway where the sky meets the earth, up ahead.
“Wait here.” Duan Ling gets to their agreed upon meeting place beneath the tree where the carriage was taken. He helps the girl off the horse.
“Don’t wander off now.” Duan LIng looks around the area and for a while simply gasps for air. He asks the girl, “You thirsty?”
From behind him a palm comes at him sideways, and the sudden rush of wind from the motion alerts Duan Ling to danger. He instinctively turns to block, but the other party’s wrist seems as hard as steel — no, that is steel to begin with! Duan Ling nearly breaks his arm, and cries out from the pain.
This assassin coming out of nowhere has struck without any warning; he hasn’t even bothered to announce himself, and the next thing he knows the assassin is moving to kick him. Duan Ling turns sideways to counter with his leg, but the assassin makes another move and Duan Ling is swept onto the ground.
“Let him go!” The girl yells, dashing forward to pull the assassin off of Duan Ling. The assassin simply picks her up by the collar and tosses her aside.
The assassin takes a step forward and lowers his head to stare at Duan Ling. Duan Ling backs away a little bit.
Who is this? Duan Ling checks the assassin’s eyes; one of his eyes is blind, the pupil coloured a cloudy sort of grey, and he watches Duan Ling with his one good eye. It dawns on Duan Ling that he’s afraid. This is a true assassin in every sense — an assassin wholly devoid of conscience.
Before he can even blink, Wu Du has appeared out of the wheat fields in a flash, so fast you can almost see a motion trail behind him, filling the air with shredded stalks of wheat as his sword goes straight for the masked assassin’s throat! With a clang the masked assassin blocks Wu Du’s Lieguangjian with his arm.
This gives Duan Ling quite a shock, as he can already envision the arm getting chopped right off. But amidst the sound of tearing cloth as the moment the sword meets the arm, where the assassin’s arm should appear reveals a black iron hook instead. The hook wraps itself around the Lieguangjian and the assassin pulls it behind him.
“It’s you?!” Wu Du says, greatly surprised, abandoning the sword without hesitation. As he does so, he turns his palm aside, throwing a spray of drug powder towards the masked assassin with a whoosh, bringing up a gust of wind that flies out at the assassin.
Duan Ling cannot help but inwardly cheer — that move of Wu Du’s is basically impossible to block; If you choose to counter it, then you’ll have to take a breath and move your qi through the palm to meet it, but there’s poison in the air so as soon as you take that breath you’ll be poisoned. While the thought flickers through Duan Ling’s mind, the masked assassin has already chosen to back away. Wu Du quickly follows his last move by pushing his other palm forward without even bothering to look, pushing the assassin right into the fields. Then reaching out almost absentmindedly, he takes back the Lieguangjian.
I do not monetise my hobby translations, but if you’d like to support my work generally or support my light novel habit, you can either buy me a coffee or commission me. This is also to note that if you see this message anywhere else than on tumblr, do come to my tumblr. It’s ad-free. ↩︎
The lighter in wuxia is a tight roll of coarsely made paper, lit with a flame then kept in a closed (but not sealed) bamboo cylinder. Under that low oxygen environment the flames burn down to embers and can burn for a long time. When you want it lit again, just open it up and blow on it or shake it to catch some air. ↩︎
As they pass by the tree where the carriage had been stopped earlier, Duan Ling reaches out to check the coachman’s carotid artery for a pulse. Thankfully he’s still breathing, and only lost consciousness. Duan Ling pulls the coachman to a sitting position behind the tree, but Wu Du has already gone on to scout ahead.
“Wait … wait a second!” Duan Ling chases after Wu Du, half out of breath as he tries to catch up. In a few steps Wu Du makes his way onto a tree; Duan Ling takes a running leap onto the side of one tree, then using it as a springboard, he leaps onto the top of another tree.
Wu Du looks carefully at the distant plains, trying to find any sign of their enemies, but within the short timespan between their escape earlier and now, the bandits had already gone without a trace.
“Damn it.” Wu Du says, “Everything’s been stolen.”
Duan Ling stares at him, unsure what to do.
Wu Du turns his head to look at Duan Ling, and it suddenly occurs to him how odd this is.
“How’d you get up here?” He asks.
Duan Ling nearly falls right off, and Wu Du hurriedly grabs him. He’s got to hand it to Wu Du for thinking of that now.
“Both the map and the letter are in the carriage,” Duan Ling says.
This is going to take so much work to fix. Duan Ling returns to the clearing and picks up a set of bow and quiver that the bandits have left behind, and tries it. The Tangut bow is too roughly made and hard on his skin, but he can use it in a pinch. Wu Du says with astonishment, “You know how to use a bow too?”
“I’ve had some training,” Duan Ling says, thinking to himself if you ever find out who I learned wall-hopping from, I’m guessing you’ll die of a heart attack.
Wu Du looks full of misgivings, and so Duan Ling makes up a vague lie to deceive him.
“How on earth did you jump up there just now?” But Wu Du still won’t give up, pressing Duan Ling for more details.
“I climbed up there! Must you try to clear up how I got up there right this moment? Let’s go find the carriage already!”
Firelight flickers in the distance, and Wu Du looks up again to find several owls flying off in a northeasterly direction.
“They’re probably over there.” Wu Du pauses to think, then says to Duan Ling, “Why don’t I first bring you to …”
Where would he bring him? Wu Du can’t exactly leave Duan Ling in the middle of nowhere, and they have an unconscious coachman to care for as well. While the two of them are still at a loss, they hear someone yelling from farther away, “Help —”
“Help!”
Wu Du frowns a little, and their eyes meet. Neither believe that it’s likely to be a trap, and so Wu Du heads over there through the wilderness on foot. They find a middle-aged man shouting, “Somebody help! Help!”
Duan Ling nocks an arrow and points it at him, but the man drops to the ground before them, breathing hard.
“Mercy! Mercy!”
The man is sweating profusely and a bit confused; Wu Du observes him for a moment, and shaking his lighter to activate it, he ignites a tree branch and shines its light onto the man’s face.2
What’s a person doing here in the middle of nowhere?
“My lady … has been taken by mounted bandits! Who are you people? Please do a good deed and save her!”
Everything is starting to make sense to Duan Ling now — the bandits must have taken the wrong carriage!
“And who is your lady exactly?” Wu Du frowns, looking the man up and down. Suddenly sensing danger, the man dares say no more.
“She’s … she’s … my lady’s come to visit her relatives,” the man prevaricates.
“You look after this old gentleman.” Duan Ling points to the unconscious coachman beneath the tree. “We’ll go find her.”
“You two are …”
Duan Ling waves off any more questions and turns to go. Wu Du says, “Hey! Wait!”
“I understand now,” Duan Ling says, “the one those bandits were hoping to ambush wasn’t us.”
Now that Duan Ling has reminded him, it becomes clear to Wu Du as well. “That is way too much of a coincidence.”
These bandits had to have been lying in wait in order to hit them without warning like that, so they must have been planning the attack for a while. When they were blurting out things in Tangut, they’d probably figured out that something wasn’t right since they didn’t see the one they were looking for, but they also suspected that it may have been a trick and that’s why they advanced on Duan Ling and Wu Du so aggressively. But why did they take the carriage too?
It’s truly a cliché to meet bandits on the road and end up rescuing maidens in distress, but that seems to be their lot. Wu Du and Duan Ling trace the bandits along the road and find the carriage tracks extending into the wheat fields. By now it’s nearing dawn, and Duan Ling never does manage to catch up to Wu du; he’s always a bit behind him, alternating between running and resting.
Finally, Wu Do can take it no more. “Just go on back!”
“I can’t find my way back anymore!” Duan Ling says, panting.
Wu Du stares at him, speechless.
There’s nothing but mountains aside from plains around these parts. When they started running, it was still night time, and as day breaks the entire world has practically transformed. After running for two full hours, if he thinks Duan Ling can find his way back he can go ahead and dream on!
Wu Du has no choice but to slow down. He looks around and realises that the carriage’s tracks end here. There’s a rocky strand across the way and the plains is covered in a thick fog just before dawn, and one can barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach away.
“The one those Tangut bandits wanted to kidnap was a rich young lady.” Duan Ling walks over to the stream, and leans back against a rock to rest for a bit. “They just got the wrong person, and thought our carriage was their target.”
Wu Du still doesn’t have a shirt on. Their clothes are in the carriage, and all he has on him is the towel he’s holding and the belt hanging at his waist. He straightens up to look over the stream, and the sound of water splashing is coming from a distance away. Duan Ling is about to say something more, but Wu Du has dropped to all fours, turning his ear to the ground, listening for the noises transmitted through the ground. “Shh,” he says, telling Duan Ling not to say anything. Then he carefully wades across the stream before turning around to beckon Duan Ling over to have a look.
Their carriage is stopped right there in a clearing beneath the waterfall, with several bandits standing guard outside, groaning and moaning as they spread ointment on each other’s necks. There’s a mountain cave a little farther in.
The sky faintly glows with first light; the mountain cave looks like a make-shift encampment put together last minute, with a lamp hanging inside, and there seems to be a few people sitting on the floor.
“Can you knock them all out in one go?” Duan Ling asks Wu Du.
“The ones outside, sure. Not the ones inside the cave though. I’ll have to use poison twice. But I don’t have anything on me right now, just this belt, and the powder inside is nearly gone. It’s only good for one use. As for the ones that are left … all I can do is kill them.”
“Then let’s lure them out first.”
Behind a tree, Duan Ling draws a rough map in the dirt and formulates a plan with Wu Du.
“Then you … get the stuff, and I’ll leave the rest in your hands.” Duan Ling looks at Wu Du, waiting for approval.
Wu Du gives it some thought, nods once, but then he turns to stare at Duan Ling.
“What?” Duan Ling asks.
“You’ve got a lot of guts. Who taught you all this stuff?”
Duan Ling is about to start stalling, but Wu Du is saying to him, “There’s no time to lose. Let’s go.”
They split up. Duan Ling takes a deep breath, draws the bow, and takes a test shot. He’s not as steady as he used to be, but he’s not entirely out of practice either. The Tangut iron bow may be powerful and exhausting to use, but he can shoot quite a distance with it.
Out in the forest, Wu Du melts into the shadows with his hands on his knees, keeping low to the ground, waiting. He turns his head to glance at Duan Ling.
Inside the mountain cave the lamp is casting a dim glow; the light whistling of an arrow cuts through the air and flies nearly fifty steps into the cave, then an arrow slices through the rope attached to the lamp. Before the bandits can react, the bowl of the oil lamp has smashed into the ground, and flames ignite the spreading fat, setting flames raging along the ground.
Those inside the cave immediately cry out, and at the noise the guards outside charge in to find out what’s happening. Those charging out and those charging in smash into each other, with the bandits inside pushing the guards aside as they rush out. Duan Ling quickly fires off another arrow. The alert bandit chief dodges out of the way and the arrow hits him in the leg.
Realising that they’re under attack, the bandit chief howls with rage, and thus begins an utterly chaotic battle where the enemy’s nowhere to be found. This whole time, Wu Du has remained upwind in the forest, waiting, and now he gracefully fans his lighter aflame, igniting several dry leaves laden with a powdered drug to produce a light, nearly invisible blue smoke that curls through the air as they drift towards the clearing.
The bandit at the front of the charging group drops to the ground; Duan Ling fires off more arrows as he backs away, watching the bandits charge out of the cave and falling onto their faces the moment they get outside. By now Wu Du has already dodged in front of the carriage and hopped inside.
Duan Ling has underestimated how many bandits there are; to his surprise nearly forty people have poured out of this tiny little mountain cave. Just as the other party discovers his hiding spot, WuDu whistles, and with Lieguangjian in hand, and still shirtless, carrying nothing but his sword case on his back, he dashes out of the back of the carriage.
As soon as Wu Du lets Duan Ling know he’s got his stuff, he quickly spreads his hands apart and an array of darts fly from his fingers, nailing the bandits to the ground.
Duan Ling hurriedly puts away the bow, and stooping to stay behind the bushes, he approaches the cave beneath the waterfall. He sees Wu Du leaps onto the carriage’s roof once more, blowing a long, winding whistle as if he’s challenging the bandits. The bandits are angered immediately, and they nock their arrows to fire at him. But instead of meeting them head on, Wu Du retreats behind the carriage, and with a flip-kick the carriage shaft goes flying out — the heavy, twenty-catty worth of carriage shaft at once flattening those bandits running at him.
Covering his nose and mouth with a wet cloth, Duan Ling runs into the cave. It’s quite roomy in there, and he can hear someone coughing violently farther in — a girl’s cough. Black smoke flies in Duan Ling’s face so he can’t tell which way is which. He grabs the girl’s hand, slices through the rope tied around her with the dagger, and pulls her up with him.
“Run!” Duan Ling covers her face with the wet cloth, and takes out of the cave as quickly as he can.
They leave the cave. Wu Du’s sword rises and falls as he weaves through the bandits, and soon enough he’s knocked out a bunch of them.
Duan Ling manages to steal a horse, and he helps the girl onto it.
“Go ahead of me!” Wu Du calls out.
Duan Ling leaves with the girl and spurs the horse on, soaring past the stream to dash deeper into the forest.
“Who are you?” The girl asks.
Duan Ling turns around to ask, “Who are you?!”
He only pulls at the reins to call the horse to a halt once they’ve covered more distance, and they’re reached a deeper part of the forest. Duan Ling looks back behind him, hesitating if he should go back to get Wu Du, but since Wu Du has told him to leave first he’s probably going to be just fine.
“Who are you?” The girl asks again. “What’s your surname? You’re Han, right? Not Tangut?”
Only now does Duan Ling take notice of the girl. Both their faces are smoked black and patchy like a couple of calico cats, and when Duan Ling sees her face he can’t help but burst out laughing. The girl stares at him awkwardly, unsure what to do when she doesn’t get an answer.
“Let me think, which way …” Duan Ling says, “We’ll have to meet up with him first.”
As he finishes speaking there’s a noise from a long way away as though someone is approaching. Duan Ling says, “Wu Du?”
“Wu Du?” The girl asks.
“Shh.” Sensing danger, Duan Ling reaches into the quiver to find that he has one last arrow. He takes aim at the depths of the forest; suddenly, a scream comes out of the woods, surprising both of them.
Right after the scream, the footsteps gradually recede until they fade away.
Duan Ling stares off silently, wondering what just happened.
He puts the arrow down slowly, and comes to a realisation that this is the real entrance to the bandit camp! Right where the noise came from earlier, there was a sentry post. The path he’s taken with Wu Du previously is actually behind the camp.
Duan Ling turns the horse around then, and charges into the deepest part of the forest until they’re through to the other side, and he only spurs the horse to a gallop into the wheat fields once they’re in the open. The sun’s been out for a while now, and on the boundless fields he can see the highway where the sky meets the earth, up ahead.
“Wait here.” Duan Ling gets to their agreed upon meeting place beneath the tree where the carriage was taken. He helps the girl off the horse.
“Don’t wander off now.” Duan LIng looks around the area and for a while simply gasps for air. He asks the girl, “You thirsty?”
From behind him a palm comes at him sideways, and the sudden rush of wind from the motion alerts Duan Ling to danger. He instinctively turns to block, but the other party’s wrist seems as hard as steel — no, that is steel to begin with! Duan Ling nearly breaks his arm, and cries out from the pain.
This assassin coming out of nowhere has struck without any warning; he hasn’t even bothered to announce himself, and the next thing he knows the assassin is moving to kick him. Duan Ling turns sideways to counter with his leg, but the assassin makes another move and Duan Ling is swept onto the ground.
“Let him go!” The girl yells, dashing forward to pull the assassin off of Duan Ling. The assassin simply picks her up by the collar and tosses her aside.
The assassin takes a step forward and lowers his head to stare at Duan Ling. Duan Ling backs away a little bit.
Who is this? Duan Ling checks the assassin’s eyes; one of his eyes is blind, the pupil coloured a cloudy sort of grey, and he watches Duan Ling with his one good eye. It dawns on Duan Ling that he’s afraid. This is a true assassin in every sense — an assassin wholly devoid of conscience.
Before he can even blink, Wu Du has appeared out of the wheat fields in a flash, so fast you can almost see a motion trail behind him, filling the air with shredded stalks of wheat as his sword goes straight for the masked assassin’s throat! With a clang the masked assassin blocks Wu Du’s Lieguangjian with his arm.
This gives Duan Ling quite a shock, as he can already envision the arm getting chopped right off. But amidst the sound of tearing cloth as the moment the sword meets the arm, where the assassin’s arm should appear reveals a black iron hook instead. The hook wraps itself around the Lieguangjian and the assassin pulls it behind him.
“It’s you?!” Wu Du says, greatly surprised, abandoning the sword without hesitation. As he does so, he turns his palm aside, throwing a spray of drug powder towards the masked assassin with a whoosh, bringing up a gust of wind that flies out at the assassin.
Duan Ling cannot help but inwardly cheer — that move of Wu Du’s is basically impossible to block; If you choose to counter it, then you’ll have to take a breath and move your qi through the palm to meet it, but there’s poison in the air so as soon as you take that breath you’ll be poisoned. While the thought flickers through Duan Ling’s mind, the masked assassin has already chosen to back away. Wu Du quickly follows his last move by pushing his other palm forward without even bothering to look, pushing the assassin right into the fields. Then reaching out almost absentmindedly, he takes back the Lieguangjian.
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The lighter in wuxia is a tight roll of coarsely made paper, lit with a flame then kept in a closed (but not sealed) bamboo cylinder. Under that low oxygen environment the flames burn down to embers and can burn for a long time. When you want it lit again, just open it up and blow on it or shake it to catch some air. ↩︎
