The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 10 – Part 6

I tugged at Shige’s sleeve and made him a sign. This was a chance that comes once in a thousand years, I thought. Shifu was tangled up with a great master and could not get free for a while, the very moment to go to his study and steal the upper volume. Shimu knew no martial arts. We would never hurt her, and we would never frighten her. I would only bow to her three times to show my gratitude, and then snatch the manual and go. But Shige was so spellbound by the fight that nothing would make him leave. He told me later that he thought that if Shifu went on fighting the long-bearded man of the Quanzhen Order,¹ in the end he was bound to use the skills of the Nine Yin Manual,² and even if Shifu really had never learned them, the long-bearded man certainly would, and to see two great masters test their skill against each other with his own eyes was far better than reading the words in a book. He could not tear himself away, so I did not dare go alone. I put my eye to the crack in the window again. Shifu’s body was sliding to and fro as though he were floating on water, and he seemed only to dodge without striking back. Brother Senseless’s moves were wonderfully clever and strange too. Then Shifu slid back right up to the window, and the long-bearded man swung his left palm at him. Shifu ducked, and with a bang the palm blew the long window open, and I quickly dodged aside. Shifu glimpsed my long hair and froze for an instant. “Chaofeng!” he cried. His movements slowed a little, and in that moment the long-bearded man’s right palm arrived. Shifu seemed unable to dodge in time, and the blow landed on his shoulder. Shifu staggered and half knelt on his right knee, but he shot out two fingers, one after the other. There was a hiss, hiss, and the Divine Finger Flick³ struck the long-bearded man in both legs. He crumpled to the ground and rolled away, and could not get up.

Shifu gave a dry little laugh. “Chaofeng, your shifu doesn’t train in the Nine Yin Manual. The Divine Finger Flick was all I used, and I beat him all the same! What have you come for?” I sprang up and knelt before Shifu, weeping. “Shifu, I’ve wronged you. I came to see you and Shimu!” Shifu said sadly, “Your shimu has passed away! The mourning hall is at the back.” He pointed behind him. I was so frightened that my mind was in a whirl. I ran to the back of the house, and there in the hall beyond the courtyard was a mourning hall,⁴ and in the middle of it a spirit tablet that read Spirit Tablet of My Late Wife, née Feng.⁵ I knelt and bowed down and wept aloud. Then all at once I saw a little girl of a year or two sitting on a chair beside the mourning hall, smiling and smiling at me. The little girl looked just like Shimu. She must be her daughter. Had Shimu died in childbirth?

Shifu was standing behind me. I heard the little girl laughing and calling, “Daddy, hold me!” She was smiling like a flower, and she spread out her arms and threw herself at Shifu. Shifu was afraid she would fall and reached out to catch her in his arms. Chen shige grabbed me and we fled at full speed and scrambled into the boat. Seawater was splashing into the cabin and my heart was still thudding as though it would leap out of my mouth when I heard Shifu’s voice carrying from far away, “Go! Look after yourselves, and don’t train in the Nine Yin Manual any more. Keep yourselves alive, that’s what matters.”

After my rogue of a husband and I had watched Shifu’s great fight, we gave up all hope. He said, “We never learned even a tenth of Shifu’s skill, and as for that long-bearded Quanzhen man, how could the two of us ever match him?” I said, “Are you sorry now? If we’d stayed with Shifu, one day we could have learned all he knows.” He said, “If you’re not sorry, nor am I.” So he trained by methods he thought up himself and taught me to train the same way. He said of course the methods were wrong, but they could still produce fearsome martial arts. I said, “Shifu told us not to train in the skills of the manual.” Chen shige said, “With skill as high as Shifu’s, of course there’s no need to train in the manual. Have we got it? Can we do without?”

The two of us also brought hard-body skills of the Golden Bell Cover and Iron Shirt kind⁶ to seven or eight parts in ten, and after that we ran riot through the jianghu,⁷ and the name of the Twin Evils of Dark Wind⁸ rang louder and louder. One day we were training in the Heart-Crushing Palm⁹ in a ruined temple when suddenly we were surrounded on every side by dozens of skilled fighters. Their leader was our shidi Lu Chengfeng.¹⁰ He hated us because Shifu had broken his legs on our account, and he had gathered a great many people, meaning to capture us and hand us over to Shifu. The brat must have wanted to be taken back into the shimen.¹¹ Hmph, the Twin Evils of Dark Wind are not so easily caught. We killed seven or eight of them and broke out, but I was badly hurt too. Was it my rogue of a husband who killed the Flying Heaven Divine Dragon Ke Pixie,¹² or was it me? I can’t remember now. It’s all the same who killed him. A few months later we suddenly found that the Daoists of the Quanzhen Order were following us in secret too. We were no match for them, and we had made far too many enemies, so we left the Central Plains and went far, far away, all the way to the great grasslands of Mongolia.

We went on training in the Nine Yin White Bone Claw¹³ and the Heart-Crushing Palm, and sometimes in the White Python Whip¹⁴ too. He said these were wonderful external skills that could be mastered quickly, and it did not matter if we had no neigong. Then all of a sudden, that night on the bare mountain, the Seven Eccentrics of Jiangnan¹⁵ surrounded me. “My eyes! My eyes!” It hurt, and it itched and stung, and worst of all, I could see nothing. I circulated my neili¹⁶ against the poison and crawled on the ground, all but fainting. I didn’t die, but my eyes were blinded, and Shige was dead. It was retribution. That Ke Zhen’e, Ke the Blind, we had killed his elder brother, and he wanted revenge.

As Mei Chaofeng thought of that painful night, her hands tightened of their own accord and her teeth ground together with a clack. Guo Jing’s left wrist felt as though it were about to snap, and he groaned inwardly, This time I’m surely done for. I wonder what cruel way she’ll use to kill me? So he said, “Look, I’ve given up on living. I beg one thing of you. Please grant it.”

Mei Chaofeng said coldly, “You still have something to ask of me?”

“Yes. I’ve a lot of medicine on me. Please, be kind and take it to Daoist Elder Wang at the Anyu Inn in the west of the city.”

Mei Chaofeng did not answer, nor did she turn her head.

Guo Jing said, “Have you agreed? Thank you!”

“Thank me for what? I’ve never done a good deed in my life!”

She could no longer remember how much she had suffered in her life, nor how many people she had killed, but that night on the bare mountain she remembered with perfect clarity.

Suddenly everything went dark before my eyes. I could not see a glimmer of starlight. My good shige said, “Little shimei, I can’t look after you any more. You must be careful…” Those were his last words. “Hmph, if he won’t look after me any more, why should I be careful?” He pushed the copy of the lower volume of the manual into my hand. “Ai, my eyes are blind. How can I read it now?” I thrust the copy into my bosom. It was no use to me, but it must not fall into enemy hands, and one day I would give it back to Shifu. Suddenly the rain came pouring down, and the Seven Eccentrics of Jiangnan attacked me with all their might, and a palm struck me in the back. There was enormous force in that man’s blow, and it hurt me to the bone. I picked up my good shige’s body and fled down the mountain. I could not see, but they did not come after me either. Ah, with rain so heavy, it must have been pitch dark all around, and they could not see me.

I ran wildly through the rain. At first my good shige’s body was still warm, then little by little it grew cold, and my heart grew colder with it, bit by bit. I was shaking all over, so cold. “Thief gege, are you really dead? With martial arts as fearsome as yours, did you die like this, and no one even knows how? Who killed you?” I pulled the short jian out of his navel, and the blood spurted out after it. What was strange in that? Kill a man and there’s bound to be blood, and I don’t know how many I’ve killed. “Enough. I ought to die with thief gege too! With no one to call him thief gege, how lonely he’ll be down there!” I set the point of the short jian under my tongue, where my weak spot¹⁷ lay. Then all at once I felt that there were characters on the hilt of the short jian. I traced them carefully. They were the two characters Yang Kang. So the man who killed him was called Yang Kang. How could such a wrong go unavenged? How could I die before I had killed this Yang Kang?

At this thought she heaved a long sigh.

Everything is over. Thief gege, are you thinking of me like this down there among the dead? If you’ve married some ghost woman, you and I will never hear the end of it…

I dug a pit in the desert and buried Shige’s body in it. Blind as I was, just finding something to eat and drink every day was hard, and I had to beg. Luckily the Mongols are kind-hearted. They pitied me as a blind woman and gave me milk, beef and mutton and flatbread. So I struggled on in the great desert for a few years. One day I was training in a mountain cave when I heard a great company of riders going by, speaking the Jurchen tongue of the Great Jin. I went out to beg from them for something to eat. The prince leading them took me in and brought me back to his estate in the Central Capital. Only later did I learn that this prince was the Sixth Prince of the Great Jin, the Prince of Zhao.¹⁸ I swept the back garden for them, and in the back garden I found a disused cellar, and I lived there. At night I trained in secret. I trained like that for years and nobody ever noticed. They all took me for a poor blind old woman.

That night, ai, the naughty young prince came into the back garden in the middle of the night looking for birds’ eggs, without making a sound. I couldn’t see him, but he saw me training with my silver whip and pestered me until I agreed to teach him. I taught him three moves and he had them at once. Such a clever boy. I enjoyed teaching him so much that I passed on all my skills, the Nine Yin White Bone Claw, the Heart-Crushing Palm, everything, but I made him swear a solemn oath that he would tell no one, not even the prince or the princess, and if he let slip a single word, I would tear open the top of his skull with one claw. The young prince had trained in other martial arts, and to no mean level. He said, “Shifu, I have another shifu, a man. He’s no good, and I don’t like him. I only like you, Shifu. I’ll never show him the martial arts you teach me. He’s nowhere near as good as you. The skills he teaches are all useless.” Hmph, the things the young prince said were a pleasure to hear. That man shifu of his was certainly no weakling, but since I wouldn’t let the boy tell anyone he was learning from me, I didn’t go asking about his other shifu either.

A few more years went by, and the young prince said the prince was going to Mongolia again. I begged the prince to take me with him so that I could make offerings at my husband’s grave. The young prince spoke for me, and of course the prince agreed. He doted on the boy and gave him his way in everything. There was no need to make offerings at my rogue of a husband’s grave, of course. I meant to find the Seven Eccentrics of Jiangnan and take my revenge. Ai! What rotten luck. The Seven Zis of Quanzhen were all in Mongolia, and blind as I am, how could I match the seven of them? That Danyangzi Ma Yu’s neigong is really something. He spoke without the least effort, yet his voice carried so far.

Still, the journey to Mongolia was not wasted. When I fired a question at Ma Yu, he muddled it and let slip one line of the true formula of neigong.¹⁹ Back at the estate I hid in the cellar and trained hard again. Ai, neigong with no one to guide you is truly hopeless. Two days ago I forced my training too hard and drove on with nothing but hard strength, and suddenly a current of zhenqi reached the Changqiang acupoint²⁰ and could not get back, and since then I cannot move the lower half of my body. I’ve never let the young prince come looking for me, so how would he know I’d suffered Qi Deviation?²¹ If this Guo brat hadn’t blundered in, I’d surely have starved to death in this cellar. Hmph, it was thief gege’s ghost that lured him here, to save me, and so that I could kill him and avenge thief gege. Ah, ha ha, ha ha! Ah, ha ha, ha, heh heh, hmph, ha ha!

Mei Chaofeng laughed abruptly. Her body shook, and her right hand clamped down on Guo Jing’s neck with sudden, savage force.

With his life hanging on it, Guo Jing twisted his hand back against her wrist and braced it outward with all his strength. He had received Ma Yu’s true teaching of the orthodox Xuanmen²² school, and after years of practice his neili was no longer weak. Mei Chaofeng squeezed hard but could not close her grip. Instead her right hand was pushed open, and she thought, startled, This brat’s martial arts aren’t bad! She clawed three times in a row, and each time Guo Jing turned the force aside with his palm. Mei Chaofeng gave a long cry and brought her palm down at the crown of his head. It was the deadliest move of her Heart-Crushing Palm.

Guo Jing’s neili was still far below hers, after all, and his left hand was held fast in her grip. How could he possibly turn this move aside? He could only summon every ounce of strength he had and raise his right hand to block.

The moment their hands met, Mei Chaofeng felt a violent shock run up her arm. A thought stirred her, and she checked the blow at once, thinking, I had no one to guide my neigong cultivation, and so I fell into Qi Deviation and ended up paralysed from the waist down. When I heard this brat say he studied Quanzhen neigong under Ma Yu, I thought to force the secrets out of him. How did I get so set on killing him to avenge thief gege that I forgot such an important thing? Luckily the brat isn’t dead yet.

She brought her hand back and gripped Guo Jing by the neck again. “You killed my husband, so you needn’t hope to live. But if you do as I say, I’ll give you a quick, clean death. If you’re stubborn, I’ll make you suffer every torment there is. First I’ll bite off your fingers one by one, and chew them up and eat them one by one, slowly.” Since her training had gone astray and her lower body had been paralysed, she had gone several days without food. She really did fancy eating Guo Jing’s fingers. It was no idle threat.

Guo Jing shuddered. He looked at her open mouth and the white glint of her teeth, and did not dare speak.

Mei Chaofeng asked, “The Quanzhen Order’s teachings speak of ‘Three Flowers Converge at the Summit, Five Qi Pay Homage to the Origin.’ What does that mean?”

Guo Jing understood, and thought, So she wants me to teach her neigong. One day she’s bound to go after my six shifus. If I die, I die. But how can I let this wicked woman add to her neili and harm my shifus? He closed his eyes and did not answer.

Mei Chaofeng tightened her left hand, and a terrible pain shot through Guo Jing’s wrist to the bone, but he had already made up his mind. “If you’re hoping for the true teaching of neigong, you can give up the idea now.”

Seeing him so stubborn and unbending, Mei Chaofeng had no choice but to loosen her grip, and said gently, “I promise you. I’ll take the medicine to Wang Chuyi and save his life.”

Guo Jing gave a start, and thought, Ah, this matters. Luckily she can’t move the lower half of her body, so my six shifus won’t need to fear her either. So he said, “Very well. Swear a solemn oath, and I’ll tell you the methods Daoist Elder Ma taught me.”

Mei Chaofeng was overjoyed. “Once the Guo… once the stinking Guo brat has told me the Quanzhen neigong methods, if I, Mei Chaofeng, do not deliver the medicine to Wang Chuyi, may my whole body be paralysed and may I suffer for ever.”

She had barely finished when someone shouted abuse from a hundred-odd feet away, ahead and to the left. “Stinking brat, crawl out here and die!” Guo Jing knew the voice. It was Hou Tonghai²³ the Three-Headed Dragon. Another man said, “The little girl’s bound to be close by. Don’t worry, she won’t get away.” The two of them talked as they went, and their voices faded into the distance.

Guo Jing was horrified, and thought, So Rong-er hasn’t got away after all, and they’ve found her trail again. An idea came to him, and he said to Mei Chaofeng, “You must promise me one more thing, or torture me however you like, I won’t tell you the secrets.”

Mei Chaofeng snarled, “What more is there? I will not agree.”

Guo Jing said, “I have a good friend, a young girl. A band of experts from the prince’s estate is hunting her. You must save her from danger.”

Mei Chaofeng snorted. “How should I know where she is? Stop your chatter and tell me the neigong secrets now!” Her arm tightened again. With his throat squeezed shut Guo Jing could hardly breathe, yet he would not give way an inch. “Whether you save her… is up to you. Whether I tell… or not… is up to me!”

Mei Chaofeng was at a loss. “All right, I’ll do as you say. To think that Mei Chaofeng, who has done as she pleased all her life, should be ordered about by a stinking brat like you today. Is the little girl your little sweetheart? You’re faithful and loving enough, I’ll say that for you. But let’s be clear from the start. I’ve only promised to save your little sweetheart from danger. I haven’t promised to spare your life.”

Footnotes

1. 全真教 — Quánzhēn Jiào. Literally complete truth order. Daoist martial-monastic order founded by Wang Chongyang, one of the most influential orthodox factions. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 九阴真经 — Jiǔyīn Zhēnjīng. Literally true scripture of the nine yin. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 弹指神通 — Tánzhǐ Shéntōng. Huang Yaoshi’s finger-flicking art, which strikes acupoints or sends small objects flying. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 灵堂 — língtáng. Literally spirit hall. The mourning hall, where a spirit tablet is set up for the newly dead. ↩

5. 先室冯氏 — xiānshì Féng shì. Literally late wife, née Feng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 金钟罩铁布衫 — Jīn Zhōng Zhào Tiě Bù Shān. Literally golden bell cover, iron cloth shirt. Hard-body external training that conditions the body to withstand blows. ↩

7. 江湖 — jiānghú. Literally rivers and lakes. The world of martial artists, outside mainstream society. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 黑风双煞 — Hēifēng Shuāngshà. Literally twin evils of the dark wind. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 摧心掌 — Cuīxīn Zhǎng. A palm from the Nine Yin Manual that injures the internal organs, practised by the Twin Evils of Dark Wind. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 陆乘风 — Lù Chéngfēng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 师门 — shīmén. Literally the teacher’s gate. The house of one’s shifu: the master, the fellow disciples, and the rules and obligations binding them. ↩

12. 柯辟邪 — Kē Pìxié. His name meaning “Ward Off Evil”. ↩

13. 九阴白骨爪 — Jiǔyīn Báigǔ Zhǎo. Literally nine yin white bone claw. A claw technique. ↩

14. 白蟒鞭 — Báimǎng Biān. Literally white python whip. Mei Chaofeng’s extremely long whip. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 江南七怪 — Jiāngnán Qī Guài. Literally seven eccentrics of Jiangnan. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

16. 内力 — nèilì. Literally internal force. The kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

17. 罩门 — zhàomén. Literally covering gate. The one weak spot that external hard training leaves unprotected. ↩

18. 赵王 — Zhào Wáng. Literally Prince of Zhao. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

19. 内功 — nèigōng. Literally internal cultivation. The practice of developing neili through breathing and meditation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

20. 长强穴 — Chángqiáng Xué. Literally long and strong. An acupoint at the base of the spine, where the Governing Vessel begins. ↩

21. 走火入魔 — zǒuhuǒrùmó. Literally fire running wild and entering the demonic. The breakdown that follows faulty neigong practice, when zhenqi runs amok in the meridians. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

22. 玄门 — Xuánmén. Literally mysterious gate. A name for Daoism, drawn from the Daodejing. ↩

23. 侯通海 — Hóu Tōnghǎi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩