The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre – Chapter 38 – Part 10

Shifu said, “Shifu has asked you to succeed as zhangmen¹ for a deep reason. Now that I have fallen into the hands of treacherous villains, my life's reputation is swept away like water, and I have no wish to leave this tower. That lecherous wretch surnamed Zhang harbours evil designs against you, but he will certainly not harm your life. You may deal with him deceitfully and seize the chance to take his Heavenly Jian.² The Dragon-Slaying Dao³ is in the hands of his sworn father, the villain Xie Xun.⁴ That boy will never reveal Xie Xun's whereabouts no matter what, but there is one person in the world who can make him go to retrieve that dao.”

I knew shifu was speaking of me, and I was at once astonished and ashamed, pleased and afraid.

Sure enough, shifu continued, “That person is you. I want you to use your beauty to lure him and obtain the treasured dao and treasured jian. This is not the conduct of a xia.⁵ But those who accomplish great deeds do not scruple at small considerations. Consider this: at present the Heavenly Jian is in the hands of that woman surnamed Zhao, and the Dragon-Slaying Dao is in the hands of the villain Xie Xun. If that gang of theirs joins forces, and once dao and jian meet, they will obtain Guo daxia’s⁶ military strategy and martial arts, and use them to ravage the world. Who knows how many innocents will lose their lives, how many families be torn apart, and the great work of driving out the Tartars will become harder still. Zhiruo, I know this task is difficult, and I cannot bear to lay it upon you, but what has our lifetime of martial study been for? Zhiruo, I beg you for the sake of all the people of the world.” As she spoke, shifu suddenly dropped to her knees and bowed before me.

I was struck with no small astonishment. I knelt at once and cried, “Shifu, shifu! You…” Shifu said, “Keep your voice down, lest the villains outside hear. Do you agree or not? If you do not agree, I will not rise.” My mind was a whirl of confusion. In this brief moment, shifu had pressed me to do three great and difficult things: first, to swear a bitter oath never to give my heart to Zhang Wuji, then to succeed as zhangmen of our Order, and now to use my beauty to lure Zhang Wuji and obtain the Dragon-Slaying Dao and Heavenly Jian. Had these three tasks been set before me one by one over ten years, I would still have found them hard to bear, let alone all at once in a single moment. My mind in chaos, I fainted away and knew nothing more.

After a time, I felt a violent pain across my upper lip. I opened my eyes and saw shifu still kneeling upright before me. I wept, “Shifu, you must rise at once.” Shifu said, “Then you agree to my request?” How could I say “I do not agree”? I could only nod through my tears, on the verge of fainting again.

Shifu seized my wrist and said in a low voice, “After you obtain the Dragon-Slaying Dao and Heavenly Jian, find a hidden place. First cut the weapons against each other, then saw with the serrations on blade and jian. Once the treasured dao and treasured jian are open, you can take out the iron pieces hidden within. This is the only method for retrieving the map. Do you remember?” Though her voice was low, her tone was most severe. I nodded in assent.

Shifu continued, “This is the greatest secret of our Order. Since the days when Guo daxia and his wife passed it to our Foundress Guo Xiang, only the zhangmen of our Order has been permitted to know it. Think on it: the Dragon-Slaying Dao and Heavenly Jian are weapons of surpassing sharpness. Even if someone obtained both treasured dao and treasured jian, who would dare risk cutting them against each other and so destroy both blades for no reason? After you obtain the military strategy, choose a man of kindly heart and sincere devotion to the country, and pass the book of strategy to him. Make him swear to drive out the Tartar barbarians. As for the manual of martial arts, you shall practise it yourself. The pure yang and hard martial arts within it are not suited to you. You may only practise the techniques from the Nine Yin Manual.⁷ To ward off powerful enemies, you are forced to seek swift mastery. After you have practised them, with your supreme martial arts you can rally the heroes of the Central Plains wulin⁸ and win the allegiance of the multitude. After you have accomplished the great task, you must still return step by step to rebuild the foundations. The swift techniques serve only for a time. They are an expedient for an emergency, not the true martial arts that are invincible under heaven. This you must bear in mind.”

I nodded in a daze. Shifu said, “In my life I have had two great wishes: the first is to drive out the Tartars and restore the Han people’s rivers and mountains. The second is for the Emei Order’s⁹ martial arts to lead all others, to surpass Shaolin¹⁰ and Wudang,¹¹ and become the first Order in the Central Plains wulin. These two things are hard indeed, but a clear path lies before you. If you follow your shifu’s instructions, you may yet accomplish them one by one, and even in the Nine Springs¹² I will weep my gratitude to you.”

Zhou Zhiruo lowered her head. Xie Xun was still chanting the sutra in a low voice, and in her ears she seemed to hear the tide surging beside the island, the waves running up the beach. She thought, That day the chance fell out most aptly. Our party came to that nameless little island, and without the least effort I lifted the phial of Ten Fragrances Softening Sinew Powder¹³ from Zhao Min’s side. I pressed to do the cooking, and slipping the poison quietly into the soup was naturally no trouble at all. Once the food was in their bellies, before long they lay senseless.

I stood beside this little demon, jian in hand, raised it high, and simply could not bring it down. All at once he smiled towards me, with a look sweeter than I can say. Had he seen me in a dream? I put out my left hand and touched his face softly. How could I bring myself to kill him with one stroke of the jian? Xie Xun was majestic and stern, and even asleep he was fearful enough. My mind was already made up. First I went down to the shore and sent the Persian ship away, then cut a dozen and more bloody weals across Zhu’er’s face and threw her and Zhao Min into the sea. I carried the Dragon-Slaying Dao and the Heavenly Jian to a cave far off, then with the jian shaved away half my own hair, and, bearing the pain, cut off an ear, swallowed a little of the Ten Fragrances Softening Sinew Powder, and went back to lie down where I had been. The Ten Fragrances Softening Sinew Powder was Zhao Min’s, and she had vanished too. So long as the bodies did not drift back to the island, it would be seamless. One night, following the method shifu had described, I cut dao against jian, then sawed a gap with the serrations on dao and jian, and sure enough two iron pieces fell out. One was engraved with the words ‘Peach Blossom Island,¹⁴ east of Mount Pudu’.¹⁵ The other was a map, intricate and winding, with arrows upon it to mark the way.

I knew Mount Pudu lay in the western circuit of Zhejiang. After returning to the Central Plains, I met my shijies¹⁶ of the Order, and I moved our main hall temporarily to Dinghai, where I hired a ship to Peach Blossom Island. The island’s layout was strange, the paths winding and complex enough to make one dizzy, clearly the work of a master who had built according to the Five Phases’ mutual generation and conquest. But with the map to guide me, there was no difficulty. Following the map, I at last dug up two copied books from beneath the earth in a mountain cave. I brought them back to the main hall at Dinghai and studied them in quiet. In accordance with shifu’s dying command, I practised the techniques from the Nine Yin Manual that could be swiftly mastered for use. The Nine Yin White Bone Claw¹⁷ and the White Python Whip¹⁸, these two martial arts were indeed swift and easy to learn. In only a few months, these two sets of martial arts could make the Beggars’ Guild¹⁹ and the Wudang Order flee before them. This girl in yellow robes, who knows whence she came? Her martial arts were plainly also founded on the Nine Yin Manual, but so pure and deep that I could not match her. When my Nine Yin White Bone Claw met hers, my hands and feet were bound, and I had no room at all to display my skill.

Footnotes

1. 掌门 – zhǎngmén. The head of a martial Order or School. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 倚天剑 – Yǐtiān Jiàn. The Heavenly Jian. One of two legendary weapons forged by Huang Rong from the swords of Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 屠龙刀 – Túlóng Dāo. The Dragon-Slaying Dao. One of two legendary weapons forged from Yang Guo’s Heavy Iron Sword. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 谢逊 – Xiè Xùn. One of the Four Dharma Kings of the Ming Order, bearing the epithet the Golden-Haired Lion King. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 侠 – xiá. A martial artist who upholds justice and protects the weak. The code of xia demands righteousness over self-interest. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 郭大侠 – Guō Dàxiá. Guo daxia. The honorific for Guo Jing (郭靖), the famed defender of Xiangyang. ↩

7. 九阴真经 – Jiǔyīn Zhēnjīng. The Nine Yin Manual. A comprehensive martial encyclopedia of yin-based arts. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 武林 – wǔlín. Lit. “martial forest.” The community of martial artists and their factions. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 峨嵋 – Éméi. One of China’s Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains, home to the Emei Order. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 少林派 – Shàolín Pài. Shaolin Order, the martial arts tradition originating from Shaolin Monastery. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 武当派 – Wǔdāng Pài. Wudang Order, the Daoist martial arts tradition founded by Zhang Sanfeng on Mount Wudang. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

12. 九泉 – jiǔquán. Lit. “Nine Springs.” The underworld; the realm of the dead. A common figure for death in Chinese. ↩

13. 十香软筋散 – Shíxiāng Ruǎnjīn Sǎn. Poison devised by the western lamas in Zhao Min’s service. Colourless, odourless and tasteless, it causes total loss of internal power. Second dose after the first is invariably fatal. ↩

14. 桃花岛 – Táohuā Dǎo. Literally peach blossom island. Huang Yaoshi’s isolated island stronghold in the East China Sea. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 普渡山 – Pǔdù Shān. Mount Pudu, taken to be the island of Putuo off the Zhejiang coast, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China and the seat of Guanyin. See Wikipedia. ↩

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

17. 九阴白骨爪 – Jiǔyīn Báigǔ Zhuǎ. Nine Yin White Bone Claw. A vicious martial art from the Nine Yin Manual that employs the fingers as claws to seize flesh and tear sinew. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

18. 白蟒鞭 – Báimǎng Biān. Literally white python whip. Whip art recorded in the Nine Yin Manual, employing an extremely long white whip. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

19. 丐帮 – Gàibāng. Largest martial arts organisation in the jianghu, led by successive Chiefs and with members throughout China. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩