The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 17 – Part 5

Guo Jing leapt down to the ground, helpless, with no idea what to do. Then, in his desperation, a thought suddenly flashed into his mind, If snake venom can’t harm me, there may be something in my blood that masters it. With no time to think it through, he groped about on the ground for the big celadon bowl Zhou Botong drank his tea from every day. He drew the golden dao Genghis Khan had given him, cut a gash on his left arm, and let the blood flow into the bowl. After a while, the blood congealed and would flow no more. He cut again, drawing more blood. He propped Zhou Botong’s head on his knee, forced open his teeth with his left hand, and poured the blood into his mouth with his right.

After losing so much blood, Guo Jing felt weak and drained for all his sturdy build. As soon as he had poured the blood into Zhou Botong, he leaned back against the rock wall and fell into a heavy sleep. He had no idea how long he slept before he felt someone bandaging the cut on his arm. He opened his eyes, and there before him hung a long beard. It was Zhou Botong.

Guo Jing was overjoyed. “You… you… you’re better!”

Zhou Botong said, “I’m better, Brother. You risked your life to bring me back. The Impermanence ghost who came for my life went away bitterly disappointed. He knew when he was beaten, and I doubt he’ll be back again any time soon.”

Guo Jing looked at the wound on his leg. The black qi had gone, though it was still red and swollen. He must be out of danger.

Zhou Botong thought, This sworn brother of mine has been a true friend to me. When he sucked the snake venom out of me, he knew perfectly well he would die. In the end he didn’t, but that was far beyond anything the two of us or the Impermanence ghost expected, the two men and the one ghost alike. I’ve no more martial arts left to teach him. How can I find some way to do him more good?

When Wang Chongyang seized the Nine Yin Manual, he had no selfish motives. He only wished to rid the wulin¹ of a great calamity. Thus his dying instructions forbade the men of his Order² from practising the martial arts within. Naturally Zhou Botong dared not go against his shixiong’s³ dying wishes. But he remembered what Madam Huang had said, “Your shixiong only said they weren’t to be practised. He never said they weren’t to be looked at. Looking without practising doesn’t count as going against his last command.” And there was some sense in that. So in fifteen years of sitting idle and bored in the cave, he had read the text over and over until he knew it inside out.

The text of the first volume set out the great Daoist way of cultivating neigong,⁴ along with the principles of the fist and the jian. The second volume held the practical methods, every kind of strange and outlandish martial art, from how to train it to how to break it, with nothing left out. He had long known it was the true and genuine manual, and that Madam Huang’s talk of “some common Jiangnan book of medicine, divination and fortune-telling” had been nothing but a lie.

Zhou Botong was mad about martial arts. Faced with this marvellous book, which held the very essence of all the martial learning under heaven, he longed to try out its martial arts. It was not to win fame and glory or to settle scores, nor to show his strength and lord it over the world. It was nothing but an irresistible curiosity and love of martial arts. He was desperate to find out just how formidable the martial arts in the manual would be once mastered.

He thought of the story his shige⁵ had told, of how Huang Shang had read through all five thousand four hundred and eighty-one scrolls of the Wanshou Dao Zang,⁶ pondered hard for more than forty years, and at last worked out a martial learning that could break the moves of every school and style. The marvellous methods it held were certainly no small matter. The Twin Evils of Dark Wind⁷ had got only the second volume and practised just two of its skills, yet they had run riot across the jianghu.⁸ If someone mastered both volumes and made them one, it was beyond imagining.

But on no account could he go against his shixiong’s last command. For more than ten years he had held this secret manual of profound martial learning in his hands. His eyes could see it and his mind could ponder it, but his hands could not practise it, and what torment that was can easily be imagined.

That day he woke from a long sleep and suddenly gave a great shout of joy. “That’s it, that’s it. This is the perfect way to have it both ways!” He roared with laughter, utterly delighted.

Guo Jing asked, “Big Brother, what way?”

Zhou Botong only laughed and did not answer. He had suddenly hit on an idea. He thought, Brother Guo isn’t a disciple of our Quanzhen Order. If I teach him the martial arts in the manual and let him learn every one of them, then have him show them to me one by one, won’t he learn some superb martial arts, while I get to scratch this itch I can’t reach? And that won’t be going against my shige’s last command.

He was about to tell Guo Jing when he thought better of it. He thought, From the way he talks, he loathes the Nine Yin Manual, and calls it vicious, evil martial arts. In fact that’s only because the Twin Evils of Dark Wind read nothing but the second volume, so they practised only the vicious martial arts and never learned how to break them. They knew nothing of the foundations set out in the first volume, nourishing the qi and returning to the origin and the rest, so they never learned the supreme skills and practised only the crude, crooked ones. I won’t tell him for now. I’ll wait till he has mastered them and then give him a real shock. By then the skill will be part of him, and however he rages, he’ll never be able to shake it off or throw it away. Won’t that be the greatest fun?

He was a born prankster. If people scolded him or provoked him, he did not get annoyed, and if they loved and indulged him, he paid it no attention. Nothing made him happier than playing some naughty trick on someone. Now that he had his plan worked out, he kept his face perfectly straight and said to Guo Jing with great solemnity, “Worthy brother, in fifteen years in this cave I have thought up a good many other skills besides the Void Clarity Fist and that game of Ambidextrous Self-Combat. We have nothing to do anyway, so how would it be if I taught them to you, a little at a time?”

Guo Jing said, “Nothing could be better. Only Rong-er says she’ll find a way to get us out…”

Zhou Botong said, “And has she got us out?”

Guo Jing said, “Not yet.”

Zhou Botong said, “Can’t you wait for her to let you out and learn some martial arts at the same time?”

Guo Jing said happily, “Of course I can. Anything you teach me, Big Brother, is bound to be marvellous.”

Zhou Botong laughed to himself. He thought, Don’t be so pleased. You’ve walked straight into my trap! He might be tricking him, he thought, but it would do him a great deal of good and was no wicked deed. So, with a perfectly straight face, he picked out a few of the main principles of the first volume of the Nine Yin Manual and told them to him.

Naturally Guo Jing did not understand, and Zhou Botong patiently explained. When he had passed on the root methods, he went through the fist sequences and jian techniques set down in the second volume and described them to him move by move. He taught only the martial arts of the true path, and none of the vicious ones such as the Nine Yin White Bone Claw,⁹ the Heart-Crushing Palm¹⁰ or the White Python Whip.¹¹ Only, he would first go off to one side, read the manual and memorise it before passing it on, so that Guo Jing would not suspect anything.

This was a way of teaching martial arts quite unlike any in the world, past or present, for the teacher himself could not do any of the skills he taught. He only described them in words and never once showed how. When Guo Jing had learned a few moves from the manual, Zhou Botong would spar with him using Quanzhen martial arts to try them out, and sure enough, the manual’s martial arts proved endlessly marvellous, and often even better than those of Quanzhen.

Several days passed like this. Zhou Botong could see his clever plan working. The martial arts of the Nine Yin Manual were steadily passing into Guo Jing, who was being kept completely in the dark and suspected nothing at all. He was so tickled that he often laughed out loud even in his sleep.

All these days Huang Rong kept cooking delicious dishes for Guo Jing, though she never showed herself. With his mind at ease, Guo Jing made even faster progress in his training.

That day Zhou Botong taught him the Hardness-Shattering Divine Claw,¹² instructing him to concentrate and circulate his neili,¹³ using his ten fingers to tear, claw, pull, and strike at the rock wall. Guo Jing practised it as he was told a few times, then suddenly grew suspicious. “Big Brother, is this a martial art from the Nine Yin Manual? I’ve seen Mei Chaofeng practise it. She practised it on living people, driving her five fingers into their skulls. It was horribly cruel.”

Zhou Botong was startled by this. He thought, Of course. Mei Chaofeng never saw the first volume of the manual, so she didn’t know the right way to train. The second volume says, “Send force through the five fingers and nothing is too hard to break. Shatter the enemy’s head as if piercing rotten earth.” She didn’t know that “shatter the enemy’s head” in the manual means attacking the enemy’s vital points and striking at their leader. She thought it meant driving five fingers into the enemy’s skull, and that training had to be done the same way. Then she made up a frightful name for it herself, Nine Yin White Bone Claw or some such. The Nine Yin Manual springs from the Daoist teaching of following Heaven and nature. Its purpose is to drive out demons and ward off evil, to preserve life and nourish it. One learns the essentials of the Hardness-Shattering Divine Claw first so as to know how to break it. How could anyone really train like that?

That woman was a hopeless muddlehead. Now that Brother Guo has grown suspicious, I mustn’t teach him this skill any more.

He laughed. “The Nine Yin White Bone Claw that Mei Chaofeng learned is a crooked, evil skill. How can it compare with my Hardness-Shattering Divine Claw of the true Daoist line? They may look alike, but they are entirely different. All right, we’ll leave this divine claw for now, and I’ll teach you a few secrets of internal cultivation instead.”

Even as he said it, he had settled on another plan. He thought, I’ll have him learn the text of the first volume by heart first. Once he understands the root methods it sets out, the martial arts in the second volume will seem to follow quite naturally when he meets them, and he’ll suspect nothing more.

And word by word, he began reading him the text of the first volume from the very beginning.

Footnotes

1. 武林 — wǔlín. Literally martial forest. Those who actually practise, teach or study martial arts. The wulin sits inside the jianghu and is narrower than it: every member of the wulin belongs to the jianghu, but a pedlar or physician of the jianghu who never trained is no part of the wulin. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 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. ↩

3. 师兄 — shīxiōng. Male senior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Xiōng means older brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

5. 师哥 — shīgē. Male senior, the colloquial form of shixiong. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Gē means older brother. ↩

6. 万寿道藏 — Wànshòu Dàozàng. The Daoist Canon of the Wanshou era, a collection of five thousand four hundred and eighty-one scrolls of Daoist texts commissioned by Emperor Huizong. ↩

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

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

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

10. 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. ↩

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

12. 摧坚神抓 — Cuījiān Shén Zhuā. Literally divine claw that shatters the hard. ↩

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