The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 2 – Part 4

The boy thought, So he wants to take me as his son. He had never once in his life seen his father’s face. His mother had told him that his father died before he was born, and ever since he was small he had envied other children whose fathers loved them. But this strange man behaved so oddly, so like a lunatic, that he was most unwilling to own him as a sworn father. “You won’t call me Papa?” the strange man barked. “Very well. When other people call me Papa, I won’t even answer to it.” The boy racked his brains for some way to trick the man into curing him. Suddenly the strange man let out a string of weird sounds, as though chanting a spell, and set off. “Papa, Papa!” the boy cried in alarm. “Where are you going?”

The strange man roared with laughter. “Good son! Come, I’ll teach you how to get the poison out of your body.” The boy went up close to him. “What you’ve got in you is the poison of that little girl Li Mochou’s Soul-Freezing Silver Needles,”¹ said the strange man. “It’s no easy thing to cure, I can tell you.” He passed on the oral formula and the method of circulating it, explaining that the technique reversed the flow of breath. One had to stand head down and feet up, so that qi² and blood ran backwards, and the poison would then come out where it had gone in. But since the boy was new to it and only just beginning, he could force out only a little each day, and it would take more than a month to drive out all the poison.

The boy was exceptionally clever. He grasped a thing at the first hint and remembered whatever he heard, and he set to at once as he had been taught. Sure enough, the numbness eased a little. When he had circulated his breath for a while, a few drops of black fluid oozed from his fingertips. “Good!” said the strange man, pleased. “No more practice today. Tomorrow I’ll teach you something new. Let’s go.” The boy was taken aback. “Go where?” “You’re my son,” said the strange man. “Wherever Papa goes, the son naturally goes too.”

Just then several eagle cries sounded overhead, and the two great eagles swept past in the sky. The strange man stared blankly after them, struck his forehead with his hand and frowned, racking his brains. All at once he seemed to remember something, and his face changed utterly. “I don’t want to see them, I don’t want to see them,” he cried. He stretched his arms forward and took a stride. His arms reached out one after the other, the first stride enormous, the second half stride and half leap, and he was already some ten feet away. A dozen or so strides more, and he had vanished behind the mulberry grove.

“Papa, papa!” the boy called, running after him. As he rounded a large willow, a sudden rush of wind swept past the back of his head. The eagles had swooped past him from behind and come down up ahead. A man and a woman stepped out from behind the willow grove, and the eagles perched one on each of their shoulders.

The man had thick brows and large eyes, a broad chest and a straight back. He was about thirty, with a light moustache on his upper lip. The woman looked to be under thirty and was very lovely, with a pair of exceptionally lively eyes. Her gaze ran over the boy a few times, and she said to the man, “Who do you think he looks like?” The man stared at the boy for a long while. “You mean he looks like…” He got that far and said no more.

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These two were none other than Guo Jing and Huang Rong. That day they had been in a teahouse asking for news of Huang Yaoshi³ when they saw flames shooting into the sky in the distance. A while later people came running through the streets with the news: “Lu Family Manor is on fire!” Huang Rong started. She recalled that the master of Lu Family Manor in Jiaxing, Lu Zhanyuan, was a figure of some note in the wulin. She had never met him, but she had long heard his name, and in the jianghu people often spoke of “the two Lu Family Manors of Jiangnan”. Lu family manors in Jiangnan ran into hundreds, if not thousands, but when martial men spoke of the two Lu Family Manors, they meant the one on Lake Tai and the one in Jiaxing. A man who could be named in the same breath as Lu Chengfeng⁴ was surely no ordinary fellow. They asked, and learned that the fire was indeed at Lu Zhanyuan’s house. The two of them hurried there at once. By the time they arrived the flames were dying down, but the manor had already burned into a pit of fire, and in the ruins lay several charred corpses, black as charcoal, their faces past recognising.

“There’s something odd about this,” said Huang Rong. “How so?” asked Guo Jing. “Lu Zhanyuan has no small name in the wulin,” said Huang Rong, “and his wife, He Yuanjun, is a nüxia of our day as well. If this were an ordinary fire, how could anyone in his household have failed to get out? It must have been set by enemies.” Guo Jing thought it over and saw she was right. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s search around and see who set the fire, and why anyone would do something so vicious.”

The two of them walked once round the manor but found no trace of anything. Suddenly Huang Rong pointed at a half-fallen wall. “Look, what’s that?” she cried. Guo Jing looked up and saw several bloody handprints on the wall, made all the more ghastly by the smoke that had blackened them. Part of the wall had collapsed, leaving only half of two of the prints. With a start Guo Jing blurted out, “The Scarlet Serpent Immortal!”⁵ “It must be her,” said Huang Rong. “I’ve long heard that Li Mochou the Scarlet Serpent Immortal is a formidable fighter and vicious beyond compare, every bit the equal of the Western Poison⁶ in his day. Now that she has graced Jiangnan with her presence, here’s our chance to have a bout with her.” Guo Jing nodded. “All our friends in the wulin say this witch is terribly hard to deal with. If only we could find Father-in-law.” Huang Rong laughed. “The older you get, the less nerve you have.” “True enough,” said Guo Jing. “The more you train, the more you know how little you’re worth.” Huang Rong laughed. “How modest Elder Master Guo is! I, on the other hand, think myself more marvellous with every day I train.”

For all their banter, they stayed on their guard as they searched the surroundings, and beside a pond they found two Soul-Freezing Silver Needles. One needle lay half in the water, and several dozen goldfish in the pond had all gone belly up. The poison on these needles was truly fearsome. Huang Rong stuck out her tongue. She picked the needles up between two broken twigs, wrapped them in layer upon layer of handkerchief and put them in her pouch. When the two of them went further afield to search, they found the eagles, and met the boy.

The boy’s face seemed familiar to Guo Jing, but for the moment he could not think whom he resembled. Then a strange, foul smell reached his nose. He sniffed a few times and felt his head grow slightly muzzy. Huang Rong had smelled it too, and it seemed to come from close by. She turned to look and saw that the male eagle had a wound on its left foot. She bent close and sniffed. The smell was indeed coming from the wound. Both of them were alarmed. Looking closely, they saw that although it had barely broken the skin, the injured foot had swollen to more than twice its size, and the flesh was already rotting. Guo Jing wondered, What kind of wound could do this? Then he saw that the boy’s left hand had turned completely black. “You’ve been poisoned by this too?” he exclaimed.

Huang Rong darted over, took his hand and looked at it, then quickly pushed up his sleeve, took out a small knife and cut his wrist to squeeze out the poisoned blood. But the blood that flowed from the boy’s hand was bright red, which struck her as odd. His palm was black all over, so why was there no poison in his blood? She did not know that the boy, taught by the strange man, had already forced the poisoned blood down towards his fingertips, so that for the time being it climbed no further. She took a Nine-Flower Jade Dew Pill⁷ from her pouch. “Chew this up and swallow it.” The boy took it in his hand, and a clean fragrance reached his nose. He mumbled his thanks, put it in his mouth and chewed. His whole mouth filled with a sweet fragrance, delicious beyond words, and a cool, clear breath went straight down to his dantian.⁸ Huang Rong took out two more pills and fed one to each of the eagles.

Guo Jing thought for a long while, then suddenly opened his mouth and let out a long howl. The strange sound burst out right beside the boy’s ear without warning and made him jump. The howl carried far into the distance, sending birds flying wildly in all directions, and the hanging willow branches beside them shook and trembled. Before the first howl had died away, a second followed it, howl upon howl, the sound shuddering and piling up like a thousand horses and ten thousand men galloping off into the distance.

Huang Rong knew her husband was using his voice to challenge Li Mochou. When she heard his third howl ring out, she too drew qi up from her dantian and let loose a long howl. Guo Jing’s howl was mighty and vast, Huang Rong’s clear and soaring. The two howls wove together like a great roc and a small bird flying wing to wing, climbing higher and higher, and the small bird never once fell behind the roc. The two of them had trained hard in seclusion on Peach Blossom Island, and their neili had reached perfection. With both howls rising together, it truly was as if they wheeled through the Ninth Heaven, and the sound carried for several li.

The strange man walking upside down heard the howls, quickened his pace and hurried away.

The green-robed stranger carrying Cheng Ying heard the howls and laughed aloud. “So they’ve come too,” he said. “I’ll go further off and spare myself the bother.”

Li Mochou, Lu Wushuang clamped under her arm, was running hard when she suddenly heard the howling. She stopped short, flicked her whisk and turned round. “Guo daxia’s name shakes the wulin,” she said with a cold laugh. “I’d like to see whether he really has true skill and learning.” Then a clear, bright howl rose to answer the first. The two howls called and replied, hard and soft completing each other, and their power was doubled. Li Mochou’s heart tightened. She knew she was no match for them. And then she thought of the two of them, husband and wife, roaming the jianghu together and holding each other up, while she was all alone, and she felt utterly desolate. She let out a long sigh. She was about to drop Lu Wushuang and leave her when she caught sight of the half handkerchief round the girl’s neck. Her heart ached. She seized the girl by the back and hurried away.

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By this time Madam Wu had helped her husband up and, taking her two sons, had said goodbye to Ke Zhen’e and gone. After the fierce fight just now, Ke Zhen’e was afraid that Li Mochou might come back and harm Guo Fu. He was leading the girl away to find somewhere to hide when he suddenly heard Guo Jing and Huang Rong howling, and his heart leapt with joy. “Papa! Mama!” Guo Fu cried, and broke into a run.

The old man and the little girl followed the howling until they reached Guo Jing and Huang Rong. Guo Fu threw herself into Huang Rong’s arms, laughing. “Mama, Eldest Grandpa just chased off a wicked woman. The old gentleman’s skills are ever so great.” Huang Rong knew perfectly well the girl was lying, but she only smiled. “A child must tell the truth when she speaks,” Guo Jing scolded. Guo Fu stuck out her tongue and laughed. “Eldest Grandpa’s skills aren’t great? Then how could he be your shifu? That’s odd!” Afraid her father would scold her again, she went off a good distance and beckoned to the boy. “Go and pick some flowers and make me a garland!”

The boy followed her over. Guo Fu glanced at his black palm. “Your hands are so dirty,” she said, “and the rest of you is even dirtier. I won’t play with you. Any flowers you picked would stink too.” “Who wants to play with you?” said the boy coldly, and strode off.

Footnotes

1. 冰魄银针 – Bīngpò Yínzhēn. Literally ice-soul silver needle. Li Mochou’s signature poisoned hidden weapon. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 气 – qì. Literally breath or vital energy. Fundamental life force flowing through all living things, central to Chinese medicine and martial arts. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 黄药师 – Huáng Yàoshī. His name meaning “medicine master”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 陆乘风 – Lù Chéngfēng. His name meaning “riding the wind”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 赤练仙子 – Chìliàn Xiānzǐ. Literally scarlet chain immortal. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 西毒 – Xī Dú. Literally Western Poison. Epithet of Ouyang Feng, one of the five supreme martial artists of the previous generation, known for his mastery of poisons. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 九花玉露丸 – Jiǔhuā Yùlù Wán. Nine-Flower Jade Dew Pill, a renowned healing elixir created by Huang Yaoshi from nine flowers gathered with morning dew. It is effective against a wide range of poisons and injuries. ↩

8. 丹田 – dāntián. Literally dantian. Primary energy centre below the navel, where qi is stored and cultivated. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩