The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 40 – Part 1

The Huashan Sword Summit¹

Ouyang Feng² said coldly, “Come early, fight early. Come late, fight late. Old Beggar, is today a bout to settle who wins, or a fight to the death?”

Hong Qigong replied, “We settle both who wins and who lives. You need show no mercy.”

Ouyang Feng said, “Good!” His left hand, which had been held behind his back, suddenly swung out gripping his Snake Staff, and he brought the butt down hard on the rock. “Here, then? Or shall we find somewhere more open?”

Before Hong Qigong could answer, Huang Rong cut in, “Mount Hua is no place for a duel. Better to fight it out on a ship.”

Hong Qigong was taken aback. “What?”

Huang Rong said, “So that Mister Ouyang can repay kindness with treachery and strike from behind once more, of course!”

Hong Qigong roared with laughter. “Fooled once, wiser once. Don’t expect this old beggar to spare you again.”

Ouyang Feng heard Huang Rong’s jibes without the slightest change of expression. His legs bent a little, the staff passed to his right hand, and slowly he summoned the force of the Toad Skill into his left palm.³

Huang Rong handed the Dog-Beating Staff⁴ to Hong Qigong and said, “Shifu, the Dog-Beating Staff and the Nine Yin divine skill together. When you fight this treacherous old villain, you needn’t bother with benevolence and virtue.”

Hong Qigong thought, With only the martial arts I had before, beating him would never be easy. And I still have to fight Old Heretic Huang⁵ after this. If I wear myself out against Old Venom, I will be no match for Old Heretic Huang. He nodded and took the Dog-Beating Staff. Startle the Snake by Striking the Grass went in on the left, Part the Grass to Seek the Snake on the right, attacking both flanks at once.

Ouyang Feng had fought him several times, yet never once seen him use the Dog-Beating Staff Technique. Even in their life-and-death struggle on the burning ship at sea, desperate as things had been, Hong Qigong had never used it. Ouyang Feng had seen how ingenious its moves were when Huang Rong used them, and had long since stopped taking it lightly. Now, as Hong Qigong launched the first two strikes, the staff hissed through the air with force behind it, and indeed the technique was formidable. Ouyang Feng shook out his Snake Staff, parried left and dodged right, then drove straight at his opponent’s centre.

His Snake Staff had been lost twice already. The one he now held was a third, newly crafted replacement, and the human head carved upon it was even more bizarre and terrifying than before. But the two strange serpents had not been trained for long, and in a fight they were neither as practised nor as quick as the first pair.⁶

Back then, Hong Qigong had been bitten on the back of the neck by one of those strange serpents and struck with a savage palm blow that all but killed him, and it had taken him nearly two years to recover. That was the worst defeat of his life, and the gravest danger he had ever faced. How could he let such a debt go unpaid? He whirled the staff until it raised a wind and threw himself into the attack.

The first time these two had duelled, at the Huashan Sword Summit, the stakes were fame and the Nine Yin Manual.⁷ The second time, on Peach Blossom Island, they had fought over the marriage contest between Guo Jing and Ouyang Ke. Both times, it was victory alone they contended for, with no threat to life. The third clash, at sea, had been a brush with death, yet even then Hong Qigong had shown restraint. Now, for the fourth time, they truly fought with everything they had. Neither showed the slightest mercy. Both knew that though the other had aged, his martial arts had only grown more lethal. A single lapse of attention, a single move taken, even half a move, and death would follow on the spot.

Back and forth they fought, through more than two hundred exchanges. Then the moon was suddenly gone and the sky went black. It was the murk that comes just before dawn, and day would break at any moment. Each feared a treacherous strike in the darkness and drew back to guard his own position, unwilling to risk an attack.

Guo Jing and Huang Rong could not help but worry. They stepped forward several paces, ready to intervene at the slightest sign that Hong Qigong was in danger. Guo Jing watched the savage fight, his thoughts in turmoil, and thought, These two are masters of our age, so evenly matched there is no telling them apart. Yet one is a chivalrous champion of justice and the other uses his strength for evil. So martial arts in themselves are neither good nor evil. It all depends on how a man uses them. Used for good, the stronger the skill, the greater the good. Used for evil, the stronger the skill, the greater the evil.

As darkness thickened and the fighters’ moves grew impossible to follow, he could hear only the whistle of weapons through the air and the rush of leaps, lunges and shouts. His heart hammered, and he thought, Shifu lost two years of training circulating his neili to heal. Between masters, there is not a hair to choose in strength. With one held back and the other going forward, this could be what loses him the fight to Ouyang Feng. If it does, I should never have spared him those three times. Then he remembered Qiu Chuji⁸ once explaining the two characters for trust and righteousness, that one must distinguish the great trust and great righteousness from the petty trust and petty righteousness. To keep one’s own petty trust and righteousness at the cost of a greater principle was no trust or righteousness at all. At the thought his blood surged, and he thought, Shifu and he agreed to fight one on one. But if he kills Shifu and goes on to run rampant under heaven, who knows how many good people will suffer at his hands? I never understood the true meaning of trust and righteousness before, and so I did a good many foolish things.

His mind made up, he crossed his palms and was about to step in to help.

Then Huang Rong shouted, “Ouyang Feng, my Jing gege struck palms with you on a pact to spare your life three times, yet you still use your strength to bully me. A man who breaks his word is worth less than a nameless nobody in the wulin.⁹ What face have you to contend for the title of greatest martial artist under heaven?”

Ouyang Feng had committed more evil deeds than he could count, yet he had always held his word as sacred. What he said was what he meant, and he had never gone back on it. It was something he had always prided himself on. Had circumstances not forced his hand, he would never have broken his oath to coerce Huang Rong. Now, locked in fierce combat with Hong Qigong, he heard her suddenly bring it up, and his ears burned. His composure shattered, his staff strayed a little, and the Dog-Beating Staff very nearly jabbed him.

Huang Rong called out again, “You call yourself the Western Venom, so treachery goes without saying. But needing a youngster to spare your life three times has already cost you every scrap of face, and then you go back on your word to that same junior. The brave men of the jianghu¹⁰ will laugh their jaws off. Ouyang Feng, oh Ouyang Feng, there is one thing in which truly no one under heaven can match your venerable self. You are first under heaven for shamelessness!”

Ouyang Feng was furious. But then he realised this was Huang Rong’s scheme: she meant to goad him into rage and shame, and the slightest impurity in the flow of his neili¹¹ would see him fall to Hong Qigong at once. So he simply turned a deaf ear. But Huang Rong’s taunts grew ever more inventive and outrageous. She pinned on him a host of notorious crimes of the wulin that had nothing whatever to do with him. She dragged and twisted and invented, until it seemed there was not a single other villain under heaven, and the countless thousands of evil deeds in the world were all his work alone.

Had she merely said he did great and vicious evil, Ouyang Feng would not have cared, for he had always worn “Venom” as a badge of honour. But the deeds Huang Rong recounted were every low, third-rate trick of the jianghu gutter. She said she had seen him begging and pleading with Venerable Lingzhi, calling Sha Tongtian “dear uncle” and insisting on taking Peng Lianhu as his godfather, all to beg the secret recipe for the poison on Peng’s ring needles, such cringing shamelessness as beggared belief. She said she had heard him put himself forward to Wanyan Honglie again and again as captain of his personal guard, so that he might stand watch every night in Prince Zhao’s Estate. As for how Guo Jing had spared him three times in the Western Regions, how he had been let out of the quicksand, the ice pillar and the cesspit, how he had taken off his trousers and leapt down the ice peak, taken three arrows in the backside and been left with a great arrow scar, if he insisted on denying it, why not drop his trousers on the summit of Mount Hua and let the company judge? She seasoned it all with ten times the oil, salt, soy and vinegar, until she had made him out to be utterly contemptible.

At first Ouyang Feng endured. But when some of her claims grew so far beyond the truth that even he could not hold his tongue, he could not help snapping back a few retorts. Huang Rong had been trying to draw him into an argument all along, and now she tangled him in it all the more, twisting and wrangling outrageously. And so Ouyang Feng fought Hong Qigong with fist, foot and staff while fighting a second battle of words with Huang Rong, and for the toll it took on mind and spirit, the war of words seemed to outweigh even the contest of strength.

After a while longer, Ouyang Feng felt his wits beginning to fail him, and he thought, Unless I use the Nine Yin Manual’s arts now, I will never win. He had not managed to reverse every meridian in his body as Huang Rong had described, but after half a year of practice, with the depth of his martial learning and the richness of his neigong, he had astonishingly achieved some small mastery. His Snake Staff swept out, and the moves shifted into strange new patterns.

Hong Qigong was startled. He gathered himself and met the assault.

Huang Rong cried out, “Yuansi ying’er, baba xiluozhe, xuelu wenbing.”

Ouyang Feng was taken aback, and thought, What do those words mean? He did not know that Huang Rong was talking pure nonsense, curling her tongue and bellowing meaningless sounds in imitation of the Sanskrit passages of the Nine Yin Manual. But the tone of her shouting varied endlessly: now it seemed furious rebuke, now earnest exhortation, now astonishment, now jubilation. Suddenly she shifted to an interrogative cadence and repeated several phrases in urgent succession, clearly a most pressing demand for an answer. Ouyang Feng meant to ignore her, yet could not help but reply, “What are you asking?”

Huang Rong answered in fake Sanskrit of her own. Ouyang Feng understood nothing. He strained to trace her words through the “scripture” that Guo Jing had written out, and in an instant his mind was flooded: a chaos of jumbled voices, faces, moves, and formulas, all crashing together. The world spun. He did not know where he was.

Hong Qigong saw a great gap open in his staff-work and cried, “Take this!” He brought the staff down on the crown of Ouyang Feng’s head.

The force of that blow was devastating. Ouyang Feng’s mind was already a tangle of confusion, and the heavy strike scattered what remained of his wits. He let out a great howl, turned, and fled with his Snake Staff dragging behind him.

Guo Jing shouted, “Where do you think you’re going?” He leapt after him. Ouyang Feng suddenly sprang into the air, turned three somersaults in succession, and in the blink of an eye rolled and scrambled round behind the cliff and was gone.

Hong Qigong, Guo Jing, and Huang Rong stared at one another in astonishment, then burst out laughing from sheer shock.

Hong Qigong sighed. “Rong-er, the credit for beating Old Venom today is mostly yours. Still, shifu and disciple joining hands, two against one, there is no glory in a win like that.”

Huang Rong laughed. “Shifu, you didn’t teach me that skill, did you?”

Hong Qigong laughed. “That skill you were born with. It takes a father as wily as your daddy to produce a daughter as wily as you.”

Suddenly a voice called from behind the mountain, “Well, gossiping behind a man’s back. Old Beggar, have you no shame?”

Huang Rong cried, “Daddy!” She leapt up and ran towards the voice.

Footnotes

1. 华山论剑 — Huàshān Lùnjiàn. Literally sword discussion at Mount Hua. The contest on Mount Hua that ranks the greatest martial artists of the age. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 欧阳锋 — Ōuyáng Fēng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 蛤蟆功 — Háma Gōng. Ouyang Feng’s hereditary art, practised crouching like a toad. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 打狗棒 — Dǎgǒu Bàng. The jade-green bamboo staff carried by the Guild Chief of the Beggars’ Guild as the token of his office. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 黄药师 — Huáng Yàoshī. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 蛇杖 — Shézhàng. Ouyang Feng’s staff, with live venomous snakes coiled in its head. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

8. 丘处机 — Qiū Chǔjī. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 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. ↩

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

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