Gan Nineteenth Sister Chapter 2 – Part 2

Li Tiexin¹ had not expected, even in his wildest dreams, that the fiend who had killed with such pitiless ease, who had snuffed out lives without visible means, was a young woman of such transcendent, otherworldly beauty. Enemy though she was, the sight of that face—a face of a kind that graces the world perhaps once in a hundred years—set his heart racing against his will.

In that instant of unguarded awe, the woman in the sedan let out a clear, ringing cry. Li Tiexin the Peerless Sword started as though stung. Her turquoise sleeve fluttered, and a slender, alabaster hand, trailing a crack like the splitting of the air itself, shot from the sedan with the speed of lightning.

Upon first laying eyes on his foe, Li Tiexin had not expected she would strike so. By the time her cry reached his ears he knew his peril, and he shifted his shoulder aside and dodged sharply to the right. Even in his alarm he did not forget to attack. The Jade Dragon Sword sang out with a dragon’s keen, its tip flashing a single point of cold starlight toward the space between her brows.

Every person outside the circle broke out in a cold sweat.

In truth, this single exchange had decided the outcome—victory or defeat, life or death.

The woman within the sedan had barely risen from her seat, the slightest inclination of her body, before settling back again. Upon her fair, delicate hand there now rested a long sword.

Li Tiexin’s Jade Dragon Sword.

She held it in her left hand. Her other hand, had delivered the strike. One blow, delivered and withdrawn in a span too swift for the eye to follow.

That single palm had not only shattered the Blood Shroud² that Li Tiexin had spent many painstaking years cultivating, it also sealed the fate of the zhangmen famed across the four seas. In a single, violent tumble, Li Tiexin’s massive frame was hurled from the sedan like a ball flung out. By the time he staggered upright from the snow, he found himself already outside the circle.

The curtain he had lifted with his sword fell back into place with a swish, after the peerless maiden had made her move.

Li Tiexin felt a sudden, savage cold seize his body. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, and his face turned a livid, dark blue pallor in the space of a breath.

Under the gaze of so many, it was a humiliation beyond enduring.

Li Tiexin loosed a furious roar and pounced forth like a tiger.

Strangely enough, he had stepped into the circle earlier without much effort, but now, even though he mustered all of his remaining strength, he could not pass the invisible boundary. Twice he charged, and twice the circle repelled him. His legs buckled and he dropped heavily to the ground. The three Hall Elders were shocked and rushed to his side. Fragrance Hall Master³ Xie Shan⁴ the Hunyuan Palm⁵ steadied Li Tiexin and drew him upright, but the instant his hand touched the zhangmen’s body, a shock of ice shot through his fingers.

He shuddered. “Zhangmen, you…?”

Seeing their zhangmen in such a state, Gathering Hall Master Kong Song⁶ the Cloud-Grasping Hand⁷ and Cloud Hall MasterDuan Nanxi⁸ the Eight Drunken Immortals⁹ were seized by an incandescent fury. Both let out a roar and they launched themselves at the circle. Yet, someone was faster.

A red blur, and the living-corpse stood before them.

Kong Song’s sword was barely drawn halfway when thered-robed man’s bamboo crop struck him squarely in the chest. A jolt of numbness ripped through his body and the sword tumbled from his fingers, clattering on the ground. Duan Nanxi the Eight Drunken Immortals, poised to charge, froze in mid-stride at the sight, rooted to the spot. The six young disciples, who had started forward, likewise halted in their tracks.

The gaunt man in red smiled coldly, baring a row of white, gleaming teeth. His pale eyes, more white than black, swept across every face before coming to rest upon Li Tiexin.

“Greetings, zhangmen,” he said, his voice flat and frigid. “Tell your people not to do anything foolish. Else, I have no objection to killing a few more.”

Duan Nanxi the Eight Drunken Immortals gripped the hilt of his sword instinctively, but under Li Tiexin’s fierce, forbidding glare, he reluctantly released it. Li Tiexin’s complexion had grown even more dreadful. A deathly ashen hue tinged with black.

He forced himself upright and spoke, “In all that I have done, I have held my head high before Heaven and stood without shame before Earth.¹⁰ Whence have you master and servant come? Why have you visited such cruelty upon the Yue… yang School?”

The man in red gave a cold smile, his white teeth gleaming.

“The Yueyang School…?” He snorted. “It is not merely the Yueyang School. I fear that all beneath Heaven… hmph…”

He trailed off with a series of disdainful snorts and said no more.

Li Tiexin was a man who could hear the melody and divine the meaning,¹¹ and could not help but draw in a sharp, cold breath.

“You cannot mean,” he said, half to himself, “that your master’s quarrel is with… the entire wulin?”¹²

The man in red gave him a sidelong stare with those pale, unnerving eyes and gave two dry, mirthless chuckle that sounded less like laughter and more like a man sucking cold air through his teeth, sending an indescribable chill down the spine. A dread that coiled in the gut.

“Not the entire wulin, perhaps. But close enough.”

He let his head droop and hissed two more of those dry, joyless laughs. “There’s no wave without wind. Nothing happens without cause. Every affair, of course, has its reason…”

Li Tiexin gave a cold, gasping laugh of his own, and said, “What reason? Since I assumed command of the Yueyang School, two years have passed without a single enmity in the wulin—”

The man in red’s hissing laughter cut him off.

Every eye, shocked, furious, converged upon the red-robed man’s face.

“Zhangmen,” the man in red said, his voice devoid of all warmth, “your sense of time is somewhat awry.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Two more hissing laughs. “We are not here to settle new accounts, only the old debts.”

“Old… debts?”

“Just so!” The man in red’s face lengthened into sudden, stark severity. “Go back and ask Old Xian. Tell him that an old friend from forty years ago has sent someone to pay him a visit.”

“Old Xian” could only mean Xian Bing,¹³ the former zhangmen of the Yueyang School. In his advanced years, Xian Bing had withdrawn from all worldly and martial affairs, retiring behind the lowered curtain of his pagoda¹⁴ to live out his days in seclusion. Who could have foreseen that a matter from four decades past would drag him back into the maelstrom? An ancient grudge was the most terrible of all enmities, and forty years was an immeasurable stretch of time. A hatred that could endure forty years without dimming must be one etched into the very bones, one that haunted every waking thought and every restless dream. A deep enmity that would never, in all the days of one’s life, be forgotten. Such is the nature of an ancient grudge.

Li Tiexin and every man present felt an involuntary shudder run through them. No one spoke for a time.

At last, Li Tiexin let out a slow, weary sigh. A bitter smile crossed his lips. “I see. So then… the woman in the sedan is not the one behind all this?”

The man in red rolled his pale eyes. “You ask too many questions. The most I can tell you is that my young mistress’s surname is Gan. She is known as Shijiu Mei, the Nineteenth Sister. It is also her title. Remember well!”

As he spoke, his eyes swept over Li Tiexin’s face, and his pallid features twisted into a mournful, malevolent expression. “Your time is running short. Return to Old Xian. Tell him that my young mistress, out of respect for his standing as a senior of the wulin, does not wish to act against him in person. If he has any self-awareness at all, he should put a blade to his own throat and be done with it. Otherwise, heh, heh…”

He had barely finished speaking when a woman’s voice rang from within the sedan, bright and delicate. “Ruan Xing¹⁵! Come here for a moment.”

The man in red was in the midst of his hissing laughter and he started visibly. All mirth vanished from his face, replaced by an expression of rigid deference as he answered, “Yes!”

In a single whirling motion his gaunt frame had already swept to the sedan. Li Tiexin and his fellows could not hear what passed between them, but it was clear that the woman within was issuing instructions. Ruan Xing bowed repeatedly, murmuring assent. Then his hands reached into the sedan and received an object from behind the curtain.

A sword.

Li Tiexin had barely recognised it as his own Jade Dragon Sword when Ruan Xing turned to depart and with a flash of red blur he stood before him again.

Ruan Xing sneered, “My young mistress returns your sword, sir. Be careful when receiving it.”

Saying that, he held the blade out in both hands. Li Tiexin accepted it with a thin, humourless smile, but the instant the sword settled into his grip, a shock of dismay ran through him. The beloved blade that he had carried at his side all these years, the weapon had lost its lustre entirely. Where once it had blazed with the brilliance of polished silver, it was now a uniform dull, metallic black. But what shook Li Tiexin to his core were three fingerprints pressed into the flat of the blade, each sunk a good line’s depth into the steel. He could scarcely believe his own eyes. He raised the sword before his face and looked again. There was no mistake. Not only were the impressions unmistakable, but the whorls and ridges of the fingerprints themselves were perfectly visible.

The shock struck him like a fist to the heart. Li Tiexin shuddered involuntarily, and for a long moment he could not speak.

Though he did not understand why the Jade Dragon Sword had changed colour, the fingerprints were unmistakably the work of the woman in the sedan, impressed into the blade by a concentration of supreme neigong¹⁶ through the fingertips. He remembered clearly now, the instant his sword had lifted the curtain, the young woman within of peerless beauty had seized the blade. When he recalled the posture of her hand, three fingers above, one below, he hastily turned the sword over. There, on the reverse face, a single thumbprint was pressed just as deeply and just as clearly into the blade.

In the wulin, masters renowned for their finger-strength were by no means rare. The greatest could bore through walls and pierce stone, feats already terrifying enough. But that this young woman could leave her prints embedded in a blade of hundredfold-tempered steel was a feat Li Tiexin would never have believed had he not witnessed it with his own eyes. The three Hall Elders and the six young disciples at his side looked upon the ruined sword and turned pale with horror!

Ruan Xing said chillingly, “Take it back to Old Xian. Tell him our young mistress says the sin is one he sowed himself. Let him decide how to answer for it. Three days hence, I shall come for his reply. When that time comes, I trust he will not put us to unnecessary trouble. That is all I have to say. The zhangmen may withdraw.”

With that, he stepped back, planted his bamboo crop upright in the snow, and clapped his hands twice. The two sedan bearers sprang to their feet and hurried over. Under the gaze of all, they hoisted the sedan onto their shoulders. Ruan Xing took his place before them, and the ornate sedan departed along the very path by which it had come.

Footnotes

1. 李铁心 – Lǐ Tiěxīn. His name meaning “Iron Heart”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 血罩 – xuèzhào. Literally blood shroud. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 堂主 – tángzhǔ. Head of a hall within a martial arts school. ↩

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

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

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

7. 摩云手 – móyúnshǒu. ↩

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

9. 醉八仙 – Zuì Bāxiān. Literally eight drunken immortals. Referencing the Eight Immortals of Daoist legend. ↩

10. 仰不愧于天，俯不怍于地 – yǎng bù kuì yú tiān, fǔ bù zuò yú dì. A quote from Mencius: “Looking up, one feels no shame before Heaven; looking down, one has no cause to blush before the earth.” An expression of perfect moral integrity. See Wikipedia. ↩

11. 闻弦歌而知雅意 – wén xiángē ér zhī yǎyì. Literally hearing the song of the strings and discerning the elegant intent. An idiom describing someone perceptive enough to grasp the deeper meaning behind oblique or incomplete words. ↩

12. 武林 – wǔlín. The martial arts community; the world of martial arts practitioners. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 冼冰 – Xiǎn Bīng. His name meaning “Cleansing Ice”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

14. 坐塔 – zuòtǎ. Literally sitting in the pagoda. A term for a senior martial arts master’s retirement from active leadership, withdrawing into seclusion within the school’s grounds to cultivate in peace. The “lowered curtain” (垂帘) signifies that the former zhangmen no longer involves himself in the school’s governance or in the affairs of the jianghu. ↩

15. 阮行 – Ruǎn Xíng. His name meaning “Action”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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