Gan Nineteenth Sister Chapter 1 – Part 4

With the bodies of three fallen comrades lying in the snow before them, neither man dared take the task lightly. Each drew a deep, measured breath, circulated their neigong and sealed their breath, and then, one after the other, stepped across the line and into the circle.

Li Tiexin and every man and woman present watched their receding backs with bated breath. The first step appeared to pass without incident, and a measure of tension eased from the watchers’ hearts.

The second step, too, seemed safe.

At the third step, Cai Nanxun on the left halted abruptly. An instant later, Huang Yunfei on the right also stopped dead.

In a single, terrible moment, both their faces transformed.

It was over in a flash. After a brief, violent bout of shuddering, both collapsed to the ground.

Li Tiexin started forward in alarm, but before he could move, a shadow blurred past him. Elder Peng had already launched himself into the circle.

Peng Wanlin had presided over the Azure Hall for twenty years. A lifetime of teaching and training had honed his internal and external arts to the very peak of refinement. He was no ordinary man. As his body descended into the circle, his two withered palms were already pressed flat against the backs of Huang Yunfei and Cai Nanxun. He let out a sharp, explosive shout and with a surge of neili¹ channelled through his palms, sent both young disciples hurtling bodily out of the circle. They flew a good ten feet before crashing into the snow beyond.

Li Tiexin’s tall frame flickered like a shadow, and in a single gust of motion he was at their side. His hands shot out and seized their wrists. The skin beneath his fingers was cold as frozen branches. His heart sank. He had intended to flood their bodies with his own Pure Yang neili, but he was a step too late. Even as he held them, their bodies convulsed one final time, and both fell still. A wash of dark blood seeped from their mouths and nostrils, each drop vivid and terrible against the white snow.

The sight of his beloved disciples dying in his hands clove Li Tiexin’s heart in two. A wave of anguish surged through him, and hot tears spilled unbidden down his cheeks. His hands released their grip, and the two bodies settled upon the snow.

Within that circle of two zhang in diameter before them, something had changed.

Elder Peng’s formidable neigong² and his deep expertise in the science of poisons had indeed made a difference. From the moment he had landed inside the circle, he had felt the crushing, hostile pressure, and he had held his ground. He planted his feet and steadied himself for a long moment before advancing.

Three paces forward. He stopped. A brief pause, and then three more paces. He stopped again.

Outside the circle, every man felt a chill of dread.

Elder Peng appeared to be gasping heavily. For a man whose neigong was as refined as his, such a reaction was unthinkable unless he had encountered a force beyond all resistance. The zhangmen³ and the three remaining elders watched with bafflement, for they knew Peng Wanlin’s capabilities intimately. With his level of neigong and his body-shielding astral qi,⁴ how could he be reduced to this state? It defied all understanding.

Elder Peng was gasping harder now.

He stood no more than eight feet from the sedan. A single leap would have brought him close enough to touch the curtain. Yet the nearer he drew, the more impossibly difficult each step became. At this distance, it seemed that advancing even one more pace was beyond all mortal effort. Peng Wanlin gritted his teeth in a rictus of agony. Three times he raised his right leg, three times he set it slowly back down.

Li Tiexin could not suppress a sigh. The three remaining elders, too, were stricken with despair. They could all see that Elder Peng was on the verge of failure. And failure meant death.

Elder Peng’s body remained upright, but the toll was written across every line of his frame. He swayed from side to side, visibly spent.

A look of desolate anguish crossed his face. “I have… failed the zhangmen’s trust of years past. I fear… I fear…”

“Elder Peng—do not speak!” Li Tiexin cried out in alarm.

Peng Wanlin’s face had gone the colour of dead ash. A bitter smile twisted his lips. “The intruder’s power… surpasses all reckoning. The poisonous qi is fiercer still. Even sealing the breath-acupoints… is not enough to guard against it. If the zhangmen were to employ our school’s Blood Shroud,⁵ … it may… it may yet…”

A jolt ran through Li Tiexin’s heart. Had Elder Peng not spoken, he would never have thought of this desperate, last-resort technique of his school. And Elder Peng would never have revealed it so openly unless he knew that death was upon him and no other chance would come to pass the word to his zhangmen.

His words enraged the enemy.

The instant the words left Elder Peng’s lips, the sedan curtain lifted slightly. A flash of scarlet—the ghostly imprint of a palm, red as blood—blazed through the air like a bolt of lightning and vanished. Elder Peng’s body buckled as though struck by a thunderbolt to the chest. He toppled backward, a jet of bright blood spraying a good two feet into the air, and rolled once in the snow before lying still. Dead.

Every man and woman present stood mute with horror, the colour draining from their faces.

Grief. Rage. Hatred. Dread—all crashed together in a single, suffocating wave. Apart from the zhangmen himself, not one person present could claim their power to match Elder Peng’s. If even he had fallen, what hope had they? Though anguish and fury burned within them to the uttermost extreme, not a single man was willing to throw his life away by stepping into that circle.

The air seemed to congeal. A tremor of cold dread ran through every heart.

The living corpse in red robes and red hat took two steps forward, extended his bamboo crop of spotted Lake Tai bamboo, and hooked Elder Peng’s body from the snow as casually as an angler landing a fish. That the full weight of a grown man’s corpse could hang from a rod no thicker than a finger without snapping it was a feat beyond all ordinary reckoning. With a flick of his wrist, the bamboo whipped forward, and Elder Peng’s body flew a good thirty feet through the air, arcing toward the steps of Yueyang School. Li Tiexin’s form blurred in a streak of motion. He caught the falling body in mid-flight, his hands steady.

In this darkest of hours, the grief in his heart was beyond what one could imagine. His face white as snow, Li Tiexin lifted Elder Peng’s body without a word and turned to face Xie Shan⁶ the Hunyuan Palm,⁷ Hall Master of the Fragrance Hall. Xie Shan’s eyes brimmed with tears as he reached out and took the body from his zhangmen’s arms.

The other two Hall Elders—Kong Song⁸ the Cloud-Grasping Hand, master of the Cloud Hall, and Duan Nanxi⁹ the Eight Drunken Immortals, master of the Splendour Hall—stepped forward with dark expressions, awaiting their zhangmen’s command. These four elders had been brothers in all but blood for decades, and were of like years and like minds, their bond was as close as flesh and bone. To lose one was to lose a wing.

Li Tiexin regarded the three surviving elders. “The enemy’s insolence is beyond all endurance. As zhangmen, duty demands that I act. I must see the face behind that curtain with my own eyes, even if it costs me my life. Should I prevail, well and good. But should I fall—the three of you must not follow me. Turn back at once and seek out our honoured shifu¹⁰ Bai Pei.¹¹ Beg him to come forth and deliver our school from this calamity. This is my final command.”

The depth of his anguish was beyond measure, yet in the teeth of mortal danger he remained composed and clear-headed, issuing calm, deliberate instructions. It was no small thing. The three elders listened with stricken faces.

Xie Shan the Hunyuan Palm spoke up. “The zhangmen is the pillar upon which the school’s future rests. This venture is too reckless. I implore the zhangmen to consider the greater good. Let the three of us go forward together instead.”

Kong Song and Duan Nanxi nodded their agreement.

Li Tiexin gave a cold, mirthless laugh. “What comes will come. What must be faced cannot be fled. Let me ask the three elders plainly—do you consider your powers the equal of Elder Peng’s? Say no more. Obey my command.”

His voice was steady, his expression cold as frost. In this extremity, his tone brooked no argument whatsoever. The three elders bowed their heads in silence.

Li Tiexin turned and took the Jade Dragon Sword from the young disciple who bore it. He paused for a single heartbeat. Then he advanced toward the circle.

It must be understood that Li Tiexin had entered Yueyang School at the age of nine. He had trained since childhood in the foundational arts, and his natural endowments—bone structure, constitution, temperament—were of the rarest quality. Recognising in him a talent that appeared once in a generation, the former zhangmen, Xian Bing the Lone Gull, had imparted to him the full breadth of his martial knowledge, holding nothing back. Yueyang School’s most extraordinary technique—the Blood Shroud—had been mastered in its entirety by Li Tiexin alone.

Under the watching eyes of all, Li Tiexin’s towering frame came to a halt at the very edge of the circle. The strange man in red robes and hat within the circle betrayed not the slightest alarm at the zhangmen’s approach. His cadaverous face remained utterly expressionless. Li Tiexin stood flush with the boundary, and though he did not set one foot inside, he was already extending his neigong outward, probing the circle’s interior with his body-shielding flow.¹² The result gave him little cause for optimism. And yet the situation had reached the point of no return. The arrow was on the string and must be loosed. Li Tiexin steeled himself for the confrontation and cast all thought of his own safety aside. The Jade Dragon Sword slid from its scabbard with the sinuous grace of a dragon uncoiling, and its keen edge caught the light, casting a pale glimmer across Li Tiexin’s face.

He stood with the sword in hand and spoke, his voice cold and deliberate. “Five lives—old and young—of Yueyang School. I shall demand a reckoning for every one. Forgive my discourtesy!”

The words had scarcely left his lips when he drew a long, deep breath. In an instant, a tide of crimson flooded across his face. A vivid, startling red that began at his broad forehead and swept downward with astonishing speed. In the space of a heartbeat, his entire body seemed to swell and distend, as though inflated from within.

It lasted only a moment.

Before the astonished eyes of all, the transformation subsided as swiftly as it had come. The younger disciples exchanged bewildered glances, but the three Hall Elders knew precisely what they had witnessed. Their zhangmen, in the face of mortal peril, had invoked Yueyang School’s most extraordinary art: the Blood Shroud.

This technique, it was said, drew its power from the most fundamental childhood training, augmented by the practitioner’s mastery of Hunyuan Qigong.¹³ Beyond innate talent and a lifetime of diligent cultivation, it required the personal guidance of a shifu of surpassing insight. All three elements were indispensable. When perfected, it conferred upon the body the resilience of vajra,¹⁴ virtually indestructible. Li Tiexin was the sole practitioner among Yueyang School’s second-generation disciples to have achieved full mastery, and by his own reckoning, he had never once had cause to employ it. If there was ever to be a first, this was it.

The Blood Shroud flooded Li Tiexin with renewed confidence. It was a ferocious, ungovernable force, one that could only be controlled by a practitioner whose neigong had reached a formidable threshold. That surging, blazing power now settled and steadied within him under the pressure of his neili, anchoring itself at the Baihui acupoint¹⁵ at the crown of his skull and the Yongquan acupoints¹⁶ at the soles of his feet. His eyes blazed with piercing light. Each hair of his twin sword-brows stood on end, bristling upward like drawn blades. The effect was one of terrible, earth-shaking majesty.

Within the circle, the red-robed strange man slowly shed his expression of haughty disdain. His thin frame shifted one deliberate step toward the centre, turning from his sideways stance to plant himself squarely before the sedan chair.

Footnotes

1. 内力 – nèilì. Inner power, the energy cultivated through neigong practice. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 内功 – nèigōng. Internal cultivation or internal martial arts, the practice of developing neili through breathing techniques, meditation, and energy cultivation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 掌门 – zhǎngmén. The head or leader of a martial arts faction. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 罡气 – gāngqì. Literally astral qi. A protective field of condensed neili that surrounds the body, serving as an invisible barrier against external attacks and hostile forces. Only practitioners of the highest neigong can manifest it. ↩

5. 血罩 – xuèzhào. ↩

6. 谢山 – Xiè Shān. His name meaning “Mountain of Gratitude”. ↩

7. 混元掌 – Húnyuán Zhǎng. Literally primordial palm. Hunyuan is the chaotic origin energy representing the undifferentiated unity of pre-creation. ↩

8. 孔松 – Kǒng Sōng. His name meaning “Pine”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 段南溪 – Duàn Nánxī. His name meaning “Southern Creek”. ↩

10. 师父 – shīfù. Master-teacher. The one who has formally accepted a student and imparted their martial arts teachings. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 白培 – Bái Péi. His name meaning “White Cultivation”. An elder master of Yueyang School, apparently of a generation senior even to the current leadership, whose intervention Li Tiexin considers the school’s last hope. ↩

12. 护身游潜 – hùshēn yóuqián. Literally body-shielding roaming latent force. A technique for extending one’s protective neili outward to probe for hidden dangers before committing the body. ↩

13. 混元气功 – húnyuán qìgōng. Literally primordial qigong. Hunyuan is the chaotic origin energy representing the undifferentiated unity of pre-creation. ↩

14. 金刚 – jīngāng. Literally diamond or adamantine. From the Buddhist concept of vajra—the indestructible thunderbolt. Used to describe a body or quality tempered beyond the reach of ordinary weapons or forces. See Wikipedia. ↩

15. 百会 – bǎihuì. Literally hundred convergences. The acupoint at the crown of the head, considered the body’s uppermost gathering point of yang energy. ↩

16. 涌泉 – yǒngquán. Literally gushing spring. The acupoints on the soles of the feet, considered the body’s lowermost gathering point of yin energy. Together with Baihui, they form the vertical axis of neili circulation. ↩