The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 17 – Part 4

A few days later Guo Jing had the rough hang of Ambidextrous Self-Combat.¹ Zhou Botong was delighted. “Come on, come on. Your right hand and my left hand will be one side, and my right hand and your left hand are their enemies. Now the two sides can have a really good fight.”

Guo Jing was young, and how could he not love a game like this? At once his right hand joined forces with Zhou Botong’s left, and they set about his own left hand and Zhou Botong’s right. This manner of combat was something he had never seen or heard of in all his life.

As they sparred, Zhou Botong kept teaching him how to attack with ferocity and defend with stability. Zhou Botong only wanted the game to be fun, but Guo Jing was learning a strange martial art the like of which had never been seen in a thousand years.

One day he suddenly thought, If our feet could fight each other too, couldn’t the two of us play an eight-man fight? But he knew that once the words were out there would be no end of trouble, and in the end he forced himself to keep quiet.

A few more days went by, and that day Guo Jing was sparring with Zhou Botong again, this time split into four men in a free-for-all. Zhou Botong was enjoying himself enormously, roaring with laughter as he fought. But Guo Jing’s neili² was still shallow, and neither of his hands could hold its own. Whenever his right hand met a dangerous move, his left hand came across to its rescue of its own accord. Zhou Botong’s fists were so fast that Guo Jing could not get back to a four-handed fight, so Zhou Botong put one hand away, and it became Guo Jing’s two hands together against Zhou Botong’s one. By now, with both hands together, Guo Jing could fight Zhou Botong’s left hand or his right to a standstill.

Zhou Botong chuckled. “You’re not following the rules!”

Guo Jing suddenly sprang away and stood there in a daze for some time. Then he cried, “Big Brother, I’ve just thought of something.”

Zhou Botong said, “What?”

Guo Jing said, “The fist techniques of your two hands are completely different, so isn’t it just like two men each attacking separately? Use this art against an enemy and it’s two against one. It could be tremendously useful. It can’t double your neili, but in moves you’d have a huge advantage.”

Zhou Botong had sat idle in the cave year after year, bored to distraction, and had thought up this game of Ambidextrous Self-Combat purely to amuse himself and pass the long days. It had never once occurred to him that it might be used to defeat an enemy. Now, at a word from Guo Jing, he went over the whole art from beginning to end in his mind. Suddenly he leapt up and shot out of the cave, and paced up and down outside it, laughing and laughing.

Seeing him suddenly act as if he had gone mad or been bewitched, Guo Jing was terrified. “Big Brother, what’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he kept asking.

Zhou Botong did not answer, only went on laughing. At last he said, “Brother, I’ve come out of the cave! I’m not passing water and I’m not emptying my bowels, but I’ve come out of the cave all the same.”

Guo Jing said, “So you have!”

Zhou Botong laughed. “My martial arts are now the finest under heaven, so why should I be afraid of Huang Yaoshi? All I’m waiting for now is for him to come, and I’ll beat him like fallen petals swept off on running water.”

Guo Jing said, “Are you sure you can beat him?”

Zhou Botong said, “My martial arts are still a notch below his. But now that I’ve mastered this art of splitting myself in two to strike twice over, it’s two against one, and nobody in the world can beat me. However strong Huang Yaoshi, Hong Qigong, Ouyang Feng and the rest may be, can they beat two Old Wild Children, two Zhou Botongs at once?”

Guo Jing thought about it, saw that he was right, and was glad for him.

Zhou Botong went on, “Brother, you’ve completely grasped the essentials of this art of splitting yourself to strike. All you lack now is seasoning. In a few years, once you’ve practised it until it’s as smooth as your big brother’s, your martial arts will suddenly be twice as strong. The only pity is that your neili won’t grow one jot. The neili in your body is divided between your two hands, so each hand has less than half. That’s the one drawback, and you mustn’t tell them about it. The moment you start fighting, use a different martial art in each hand and pound them till their heads are spinning, and they’ll have no time to notice the weakness.”

The two of them talked on and on, both of them overjoyed.

Until now Zhou Botong had dreaded Huang Yaoshi coming to make trouble for him. Now he longed for him to come quickly, so that he could beat him with his strange new art. He kept staring out, wild with impatience, and had he not known how cunningly the island was laid out, he would long since have gone to look for him.

When evening came for their meal, the mute servant brought food. Zhou Botong grabbed hold of him and said, “Quick, go and fetch Huang Yaoshi. I’m waiting for him here. Let him have a taste of what I can do!”

The mute servant only shook his head.

Zhou Botong finished speaking before he realised. “Pah! I forgot you’re deaf and dumb!” He turned to Guo Jing. “Tonight we two are going to eat well.” He reached over and lifted the lid off the food container.

A rich aroma reached Guo Jing’s nose, quite different from the usual dishes. He came over to look, and saw that besides two small dishes there was a big bowl of chicken stewed with winter mushrooms, the dish he loved best of all.

He gave a start, took up a spoon and tasted a spoonful of the soup. The saltiness and the savour of the chicken broth were exactly like Huang Rong’s own. He knew she had made it specially for him, and his heart began to thump wildly. He examined the other food carefully. Nothing seemed amiss. In the food container were over a dozen mantou. One of them had a tiny gourd scratched into its skin with a fingernail. The mark was so faint that unless you looked carefully, you would never notice it.

Guo Jing sensed something was special about that mantou. He picked it up, broke it in half with both hands, and revealed a wax pill inside. Seeing that neither Zhou Botong nor the mute servant had noticed, he slipped it into his robe.

Neither of them tasted a thing at that meal. One was thinking how, without meaning to, he had mastered a peerless martial art that made him invincible under heaven, and as his right hand grabbed a mantou to eat, his left hand threw a few punches. That too was putting both hands to two uses, one grabbing mantou, one throwing punches. The other was in a hurry to finish eating so that he could see what message Huang Rong had hidden in the wax pill. Zhou Botong tried to cram mantou into his mouth with one hand while lifting the soup bowl with the other, to finish as fast as he could, but it did not work. He roared with laughter. “The Old Wild Child has only one mouth, so two hands are no use to him.”

At long last Zhou Botong finished his mantou and gulped down his soup. The mute servant took away the food container. Guo Jing quickly took out the wax pill, crushed the wax, and pulled out the paper hidden inside. It was indeed written in Huang Rong’s hand:

Jing gege:³

Don’t worry. Papa and I have made it up. Wait while I talk him round, little by little, into letting you go. I can’t come to see you, but I think of you every day.

At the end it was signed “Rong-er.”

Wild with joy, Guo Jing showed the note to Zhou Botong. Zhou Botong laughed. “With me here, he’ll have to let you go whether he wants to or not. We’ll make him let you go, we won’t beg him. If he won’t agree, I’ll shut him up in this cave for fifteen years. Oh, no, that’s no good. Better not shut him up, or he’ll master the marvellous art of dividing the mind to two uses and fighting hand against hand in there too.”

Slowly the sky grew dark. Guo Jing sat down cross-legged to train, but his thoughts were on Huang Rong, and for a long time he could not settle. Only after a long while did he reach that state of still, empty silence with no stray thought in his breast. He sent his inner breath round his body several times. Then all at once he thought, If I truly want to master the supreme art of one person acting as two, striking left and right separately, then the inner breath and the circulation of neili must also divide left and right, each independent. Only then can each hand possess neili when it strikes. So he pressed a finger to one nostril and then the other and began to practise, breathing in and out through the left alone, then in and out through the right alone.

After practising for about a watch, he felt he had made a little progress. Then he heard the whoosh of rushing air, and opening his eyes, he saw a long beard and long hair streaming and dancing in the dark. Zhou Botong was practising his fists. Guo Jing opened his eyes wide and watched intently. Zhou Botong’s left hand was working through the Seventy-Two Paths of the Void Clarity Fist,⁴ while his right hand was using quite another set, of Quanzhen palm techniques. He threw his palms and fists very slowly, yet every move still came with a whooshing palm wind and carried tremendous force. It seemed that in an instant his neili could flow from left to right and from right to left, riding on his moves.

Guo Jing watched in the deepest admiration. He thought that to give left and right their own neili would be extremely hard to train, and since the body has only one set of jingmai,⁵ dividing them into left and right would probably never work. But shifting neili to the left and to the right, as Zhou Botong did, could be done, much like moving troops about in battle, and did not seem so very hard.

Just when the one was lost in his fighting and the other lost in watching, Zhou Botong suddenly let out a sharp cry of alarm. Then came a smack, and something long and black flew up from beside him and hit a tree trunk some way off, as if he had flung it. Guo Jing saw him sway again and again, and rushed over in alarm, crying, “Big Brother, what is it?”

Zhou Botong said, “A poisonous snake has bitten my foot! This is as bad as it could be!”

More alarmed than ever, Guo Jing ran close. Zhou Botong’s face had already changed colour. Leaning on Guo Jing’s shoulder, he walked back to the cave, tore off a strip of his robe and tied it round his thigh, so that the poison would not rise any higher for the time being.

Guo Jing took his huozhezi⁶ out of his robe and shook it alight. When he looked, his heart gave a jolt. One of Zhou Botong’s calves had swollen to more than twice its usual thickness.

Zhou Botong said, “There’s never been a green viper this venomous on the island. Where did it come from? I was practising my fistwork. The snake shouldn’t have been able to bite me. But I had to go and use my two hands for two different sets of fists, and with my mind divided… ah!”

Hearing his voice shake, Guo Jing knew the poison had gone deep, and that without a supreme neigong⁷ to force it back he would have lost consciousness long ago. In his panic, he bent down and began sucking at the wound.

Zhou Botong cried out urgently, “You mustn’t. This is no ordinary snake venom. One suck and you’ll die.”

But all Guo Jing could think of now was saving his life, and his own safety never entered his head. His right arm held Zhou Botong’s legs pinned down while he sucked and sucked at the wound. Zhou Botong wanted to struggle and stop him, but his whole body had gone weak and he could not move. A little later he fainted outright.

Guo Jing sucked for the time it takes to eat a meal and drew out more than half the venom, spitting it onto the ground.

With the poison weakened, and his neili so deep, Zhou Botong came round again after half a shichen⁸ in a faint. He said in a low voice, “Brother, your elder brother is going up to Heaven today. But before he dies, he has made a friend of a brother as loyal and loving as you, and that makes your elder brother very happy.”

Guo Jing had known him only a few days, but both were plain, straightforward men who opened their hearts to each other, so that it was as if they had been close friends for decades. Now, seeing from his face that he was about to die, Guo Jing could not hold back the tears that rolled down his cheeks.

Zhou Botong gave a forlorn smile. “The text of the Nine Yin Manual⁹ is in a stone casket, buried in the earth under where I’m sitting. I ought to give it to you. But you’ve sucked out viper venom, so you won’t live long either. We can walk the road to the Yellow Springs¹⁰ hand in hand, and at least we won’t be short of a playmate. Down in the underworld we can play a four-man… no, a four-ghost fight. That would be fun, ha ha, ha ha. The big-headed ghosts and the Impermanence ghosts won’t know what to make of it, and their ghostly faces will turn pale.” By the end he had actually cheered up again.

Guo Jing heard him say that he too was about to die, yet he could feel nothing wrong with himself anywhere. He lit the huozhezi again to look at the wound. In its light he saw that Zhou Botong’s face had turned ashen, veiled in a film of black qi. That childlike face, with its black hair and rosy, youthful skin, had lost all its bloom.

Seeing the light, Zhou Botong gave him a faint smile. But when he saw that Guo Jing looked just as usual, without the slightest sign of poisoning, he was utterly puzzled. He drew a breath and asked, “Brother, what wonder drug have you taken? Why can’t even venom as deadly as this harm you?”

Guo Jing was taken aback. He supposed it must be because he had drunk the medicinal blood of the Ginseng Old Eccentric’s¹¹ great python. He said, “I once drank the blood of a huge python. Perhaps that’s why snake venom can’t harm me.”

Zhou Botong was just gathering his thoughts to think about this when he fainted again.

Guo Jing hastily massaged his meridians to get the blood moving, but it did no good at all. When he felt Zhou Botong’s calf, it was burning hot to the touch and more swollen than ever. Then he heard him mumbling, “On the fourth loom, the mandarin ducks are woven, longing to fly as a pair…”

Guo Jing asked, “What did you say?”

Zhou Botong sighed. “Alas, the head turns white before one is old. Alas…”

Seeing that his mind was wandering and he was talking nonsense, Guo Jing was frantic. He ran out of the cave, leapt to the top of a tree and shouted at the top of his voice, “Rong-er, Rong-er! Island Master Huang, Island Master Huang! Help, help!”

Peach Blossom Island was some dozens of li¹² round, a very large place, and Huang Yaoshi’s house was a long way off. However loudly Guo Jing shouted, no one could hear him.

Footnotes

1. 双手互搏 — Shuāngshǒu Hùbó. Fighting technique where both hands operate independently, allowing each hand to perform different techniques simultaneously. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

3. 靖哥哥 — Jìng gēge. Literally elder brother Jing. ↩

4. 空明拳 — Kōngmíng Quán. The softest fist art in the world, which Zhou Botong drew from the Daodejing. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 经脉 — jīngmài. Literally meridians. Energy channels through which qi flows. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 火折子 — huǒzhézi. A tinder tube: rolled paper or fibre treated with saltpetre, kept smouldering in a tube and revived with a puff of breath. ↩

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

8. 时辰 — shíchén. Traditional Chinese unit of time equal to two hours; the day was divided into twelve shichen. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

10. 黄泉 — huángquán. Literally yellow springs. The underworld of Chinese mythology, where the dead reside. ↩

11. 参仙老怪 — shēnxiān lǎoguài. Literally ginseng immortal old eccentric. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

12. 里 — lǐ. A traditional unit of distance, about 500 metres or one-third of a mile. ↩