The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 7 – Part 4

By now Xiaolongnü was no longer as strict with him as she used to be. Weary as she was, she felt it better to humour him, and she smiled. “All right, then!” She walked round the chamber, deep in thought, and at last gazed for a while into the stone coffin they had just been lying in. “So this coffin was left by Wang Chongyang too,” she said. “Its bottom lifts out.”

Yang Guo was overjoyed. “Ah, I see it now. That’s the door to the stone chamber.” He sprang straight into the coffin and felt all around, and sure enough his fingers found a hollow just big enough for a hand. He gripped it hard and heaved upwards, but it would not stir a hair. “Turn it to the left first,” said Xiaolongnü, “then lift.” Yang Guo turned and then lifted as she said. There was a sharp crack, and the stone slab of the coffin floor came up in his hand. “It’s working!” he cried in delight. “Not so fast,” said Xiaolongnü. “Wait till the foul air has cleared out of the hole before we go in.”

Yang Guo fidgeted, unable to sit or stand still. After a while he said, “Aunt, is it ready yet?” Xiaolongnü sighed. “Impatient as you are, it can’t have been easy for you, keeping me company all these years.” She rose slowly, took the candlestick, and went down with him through the bottom of the coffin. Below was a flight of stone steps. At the foot of the steps a short passage ran on, turned a corner, and there, sure enough, was another stone chamber.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the room itself. As one, they both looked up. The ceiling was crowded with writing and symbols, and at the far right were four large characters: Nine Yin Manual.¹

Neither of them knew that what the Nine Yin Manual held was the very highest realm of martial learning. They looked at it for a while but found it abstruse and baffling. “Even if this skill really is beyond compare,” said Xiaolongnü, “it’s no use to us now.”

Yang Guo sighed. He was about to lower his eyes and look no more when, at a glance, he noticed a diagram drawn in the south-west corner of the ceiling. It seemed to have nothing to do with martial arts. He looked hard. It rather resembled a map. “What’s that?” he asked. Xiaolongnü looked where his finger pointed. She had looked only a moment when her whole body went rigid, and she did not move again.

A long while passed, and still she stood like a stone statue, staring rapt at the diagram. Yang Guo grew frightened and tugged at her sleeve. “Aunt, what’s wrong?” Xiaolongnü gave a little “Mm”, then suddenly buried her face in his chest and began to sob. “Does it hurt again?” Yang Guo asked gently. “No,” said Xiaolongnü, “it isn’t that.” It was a long time before she said, “We can get out.” Yang Guo leapt up in delight. “Really?” he shouted. Xiaolongnü nodded. “That drawing,” she said softly, “shows the secret way out of the tomb.” She knew the lie of the tomb so well that she had understood the drawing the moment she saw it.

Yang Guo was beside himself with joy. “Wonderful! Then why are you crying?” Tears still in her eyes, Xiaolongnü smiled sweetly. “I was never afraid of dying before. I was going to spend my whole life in this tomb anyway, so what did it matter if I died sooner or later? But, but these last few days, I keep thinking that you’re so good to me, and I want to be with you and have some happy days, and I want to go outside and see the world. Guoer, I’m frightened and happy, both at once.”

Yang Guo took her hand. “Aunt, when we get out together, I’ll pick flowers for you to wear and catch crickets for you to play with. Would you like that?” All these years he had lived only in the ancient tomb, and though he had grown, the fun he could think of was still the games of his childhood. Xiaolongnü had never played with anyone. She lay listening quietly as he chattered on in high spirits, until at last, after a good while, she could hold up no longer and leaned slowly against his shoulder. Yang Guo talked on for a time, heard no answer, and turned his head. Her eyes were lightly closed and her breathing faint. She had fallen fast asleep. His heart eased, drowsiness crept over him, and before he knew it he had drifted off as well.

How long they slept they never knew. All at once Yang Guo felt an ache at his waist: someone had jabbed a finger into the Central Pivot acupoint² in the small of his back. He woke with a start, but as he tried to spring up and fight back, a grappling hold clamped the back of his neck like iron and he could not move at all. Turning his head, he saw Li Mochou and her disciple standing over him, all smiles. His shifu’s acupoints had been sealed as well. Neither Yang Guo nor Xiaolongnü had the least experience of guarding against enemies in the jianghu. In their joy it had never occurred to them to go back up and put the stone floor of the coffin back in place, and so Li Mochou had found the underground chamber and taken them by surprise.

Li Mochou gave a cold laugh. “Well, well. So there’s such a cosy little place down here, and the two little ones were hiding away in it, taking their ease. Shimei,³ you’d better put your mind to it. There may just be a way out of the tomb.” “Even if I knew,” said Xiaolongnü, “I wouldn’t tell you.” Li Mochou had been quite convinced that what Xiaolongnü said earlier was true, that the Dragon-Breaking Stones were down and there was no hope of getting out. But Xiaolongnü had not a shred of guile in her, and the tone and look with which she spoke those two sentences made it plain that she knew a way out. Li Mochou was overjoyed. “Dear shimei, lead us out, and I’ll never make trouble for you again.” “You came in by yourselves,” said Xiaolongnü. “Find your own way out. Why should I lead you?”

Li Mochou had always known her shimei to be stubborn and wilful. Even their shifu, in her lifetime, had often given way to her a little, and force and threats would almost certainly get nowhere. But with life and death at stake she had to push her somehow. She reached out and struck hard at the Celestial Prominence acupoint⁴ at the base of each of their throats, then jabbed the Five Pivots acupoint⁵ between belly and thigh. The Celestial Prominence is where the Yin Linking Vessel meets the Conception Vessel, and the Five Pivots is where the Foot Lesser Yang meets the Girdle Vessel. Li Mochou was using the secret acupoint-sealing technique of the Ancient Tomb School, and she reckoned that before long the two of them would be numb and itching all over past bearing, and would have to give up the secret.

Xiaolongnü shut her eyes and ignored her completely. “If my aunt knew a way out,” said Yang Guo, “why wouldn’t we have got out already? Why would we still be here?” Li Mochou laughed. “She let it slip just now, and there’s no taking it back. Of course she knows this ancient tomb has another, secret way out. Once you two had rested up, naturally you’d be off. Shimei, are you going to tell me or not?” “Once you were outside,” Xiaolongnü said softly, “you’d only go looking for ways to kill and hurt people. What good is there in getting out?”

Li Mochou sat to one side hugging her knees, smiling and saying nothing. After a while Yang Guo was the first who could stand it no longer. “Hey, Li Mochou,” he shouted. “Did our founding matriarch hand down this acupoint technique so you could bully your own people? Using it to hurt your own shimei, can you look our founding matriarch in the face?” Li Mochou smiled. “You call me Li Mochou. We stopped being ‘our own people’ long ago.”

Yang Guo whispered in Xiaolongnü’s ear, “Whatever you do, don’t tell her the secret of the way out. As long as Li Mochou doesn’t know it, she’ll never kill us. The moment she knows the way out, she’ll finish us off.” “You’re right,” said Xiaolongnü. “I hadn’t thought of that. I was never going to tell her anyway.” She was lying on the floor, and whenever she opened her eyes she saw the map on the ceiling. She thought, If Shijie⁶ finds this map, it’ll be a disaster. I mustn’t let my eyes go anywhere near it.

---

Long ago, when Wang Chongyang learned that Lin Chaoying had died in the Tomb of the Living Dead,⁷ he remembered how she had loved him with a devotion that lasted all her life. Such love was no small thing, and now that they were parted as the living are from the dead, the grief in his heart was terrible. He slipped into the tomb by the secret passage, keeping out of sight of her maids and disciples, and gazed long upon the dead face of his old companion of the jianghu, and wept bitterly, stifling every sound. Only then did he make a round of the stone tomb he himself had built in years gone by. He saw the portrait Lin Chaoying had painted of him standing with his back turned, and he saw the writings she had left carved on the ceilings of two stone chambers. When he saw how subtle, profound and wonderful were the martial arts set down in the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra, and that every move was indeed the bane of a Quanzhen one, his face turned the colour of ashes, and he left at once.

He went alone deep into the mountains and built himself a thatched hut. For three whole years he never set foot outside the mountains, studying how to break the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra. He had small successes here and there, but never managed to build a whole system of martial learning that held both the inner and the outer and wove them into one. Disheartened, he admired Lin Chaoying’s brilliance more than ever, conceded himself beaten, and gave up the study. More than ten years later, at the Huashan Sword Summit,⁸ he won that wondrous martial text, the Nine Yin Manual. He was resolved never to practise the skills in it, but curiosity got the better of him, and he could not help leafing through it once.

By then his martial arts were already the first under heaven. All the secret depths and essential principles of the Nine Yin Manual needed only to pass before his eyes and be pondered for ten days or more, and the whole of it lay open to him. He knew that once the essentials of the Nine Yin Manual were mastered, breaking the martial arts of the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra would be no trouble at all. He threw back his head and laughed long at the sky. Then he returned to the Tomb of the Living Dead, and on the ceiling of the most secret underground chamber in the whole tomb he carved the essentials of the manual, pointing out one by one how to break the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra. Looking over the tomb, he guessed that the empty coffins would one day be used by Lin Chaoying’s disciples. Most likely they would climb into a coffin themselves when their end drew near and lie there waiting to die, and then they would surely learn that the founder of the Quanzhen Order had never in all his life been second to anyone. So he wrote the sixteen characters on the underside of one empty coffin lid, so that Lin Chaoying’s heirs would learn, in the hour of their death, that the martial learning of the Quanzhen Order’s founder was truly beyond the power of the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra to overcome.

It was no more than a moment’s pride on his part. He had no wish to let the Nine Yin Manual out into the world, and he reckoned that by the time Lin Chaoying’s disciples saw it they would already be at their last gasp, and could only carry the secret with them into the earth.

Wang Chongyang and Lin Chaoying were both prodigies of the martial arts, a match made in heaven. No third party, man or woman, came between them to stir up storms of love, and there was no feud or tangle among kin, friends or fellow disciples. At first Wang Chongyang had been wholly taken up with the great cause of raising an army against the Jin,⁹ and had no time for matters of the heart. But after his volunteer army was crushed and he was living out his days in the ancient tomb, Lin Chaoying came to comfort him, and her tenderness and nobility moved him deeply. By then there was no reason left why the match should not be made. Yet it still ended in lasting sorrow under heaven: one of them left the world and took the yellow cap of a Daoist, and the other pined away in a stone tomb until her death. The reason for it Qiu Chuji¹⁰ and the other disciples certainly never knew. Even Wang and Lin themselves could hardly have explained it, and could only put it down to the words “not fated”. They did not know that “not fated” was the effect and not the cause. With martial arts so high, each grew ever prouder, and whenever the shoots of love began to sprout, rivalry in talking of the martial arts sprang up alongside them, and neither would ever give way to the other. Matched against each other, it was Lin Chaoying who came out a little ahead in the end, and since Wang Chongyang could never bring himself to stand below a woman, whenever he felt the least stirring of love for Lin Chaoying he forced it down. Later Lin Chaoying created the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra to overcome Quanzhen martial arts, and Wang Chongyang, unwilling to admit defeat, carved the essentials of the Nine Yin Manual in the tomb. But he reflected that the Jade Maiden Heart Sutra was Lin Chaoying’s own creation, whereas he had leaned on a book left by those before him. Set side by side, he truly fell a step short. From then on he humbled himself deeply, and often taught his disciples the way of yielding and self-restraint, of an open mind and a hidden light.

Footnotes

1. 九阴真经 – Jiǔyīn Zhēnjīng. Most comprehensive martial arts manual in the wulin, compiled by Huang Shang during the Northern Song dynasty. It contains both internal and external techniques of the highest order. ↩

2. 中枢穴 – Zhōngshū Xué. Literally central pivot. Acupoint on the lower back along the spine on the governing vessel meridian. See Wikipedia. ↩

3. 师妹 – shīmèi. Female junior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Mèi means younger sister. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 天突穴 – Tiāntū Xué. Literally celestial prominence. Acupoint at the base of the throat on the conception vessel meridian. See Wikipedia. ↩

5. 五枢穴 – Wǔshū Xué. Literally five pivots. Acupoint in the lower abdomen on the gallbladder meridian. See Wikipedia. ↩

6. 师姐 – shījiě. Female senior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Jiě means older sister. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 活死人墓 – Huósǐrén Mù. Tomb of the Living Dead, the vast underground complex beneath Zhongnan Mountain built by Wang Chongyang. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 华山 – Huáshān. One of China’s Five Sacred Mountains, site of martial arts competitions. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. Jin Dynasty (金朝). Jurchen-led dynasty (1115–1234) that ruled northern China during this period. Wang Chongyang’s volunteer army fought against the Jin, who had conquered the Central Plains from the Song dynasty. ↩

10. 丘处机 – Qiū Chǔjī. His name meaning “dwelling in opportunity”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩