The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 8 Part 3

Xie Xun gave a desolate sigh. “I meant to exploit his merciful nature. You have guessed correctly. When I brought my palm down upon my own crown, it was a stratagem born of desperation—a gamble staked on the slenderest of odds. Had the blow lacked true force, he would have seen through the ruse and would not have come to intervene. Of the thirteen punches, only the last remained. The Seven Injuries Fist was fearsome, to be sure, but how could it break through his protective divine skill? If it failed, all hope of finding my shifu would be lost forever. I threw everything upon a single cast of the dice. That palm strike carried every shred of my strength. Had he not come to save me, I would have shattered my own skull and died, for if my vengeance could never be fulfilled, I had no wish to go on living.

“Master Kongjian saw what was happening and cried out, ‘You must not! Why should you—’ He leapt toward me at once, his hand sweeping my right palm aside. My left fist shot out and struck him between chest and belly. He was utterly unprepared; the thought of engaging his divine skill had not even arisen. Flesh and blood—how could they withstand such a blow? His organs ruptured from the shock and he crumpled to the ground.

“Having landed that punch, I saw that he could not survive, and in that instant my conscience awoke. I threw myself upon him and wept, crying, ‘Master Kongjian! Xie Xun is a faithless, ungrateful wretch—lower than a beast!’”

The three listeners fell silent, each thinking that to have slain so virtuous a monk by such treachery was a deed that should never have been done.

Xie Xun said, “When Master Kongjian saw me weeping, he smiled faintly and spoke to comfort me. ‘All men must die. Why should you grieve, Layman? Your shifu will arrive shortly. You must compose yourself and proceed with care—do not act rashly.’ His words brought me to my senses. Those thirteen punches had drained a vast measure of my true qi, and now a formidable enemy was drawing near. I could not go on weeping and sapping my spirit. I sat cross-legged and steadied my breathing. Yet a long while passed, and my shifu did not come. Bewildered, I looked toward Master Kongjian.

“By then his breath was failing. In halting, broken words he said, ‘I never… never imagined he would… go back on his word… Could it be… could it be that something has suddenly detained him?’ My rage erupted. I roared, ‘You lied to me! You tricked me into killing you, and still my shifu will not show himself!’ He shook his head. ‘I did not lie to you. I am truly sorry.’ In my fury I wanted to curse him further, but a thought stopped me cold: He tricked me into killing him—what possible benefit could that bring him? I killed him, and he apologises to me. A boundless shame washed through me. I knelt before him and said, ‘Master, if you have any last wish, I swear I will see it done.’ He smiled faintly and said, ‘I only hope that hereafter, whenever you are about to take a life, you will sometimes think of me.’

“This eminent monk was not only consummate in martial arts but possessed of the deepest wisdom and understanding. He knew my nature through and through. He knew he could never persuade me to abandon my vengeance and become a virtuous man. And so he asked only that I think of him when I was about to kill. Fifth Brother, that day on the ship when you and I matched palm strength, the reason I did not take your life was that Master Kongjian rose suddenly in my thoughts.”

Zhang Cuishan had never imagined that his own life had been saved by Master Kongjian. His admiration for the eminent monk deepened immeasurably.

Xie Xun sighed. “His breathing grew ever weaker. I pressed my palm upon his Lingtai acupoint¹ and poured my neili into him, desperately trying to prolong his life. He suddenly drew a deep breath and asked, ‘Has your shifu come?’ I said, ‘He has not.’ He said, ‘Then he will not come. He… he deceived even me.’ I said, ‘Master, rest assured. I will not go on killing indiscriminately to draw him out. But I will search to the very ends of the earth until I find him.’ He said, ‘Yes… but your martial arts are no match for his… unless… unless…’ His voice grew fainter and fainter. I brought my ear close to his lips and heard him say, ‘Unless… you can find the Dragon Saber… find the secret within the dao…’² He reached the word secret, but his breath failed him, and he died.”

Only then did Zhang Cuishan and his wife at last understand: why Xie Xun had brooded endlessly over the Dragon Saber’s secret; why a man ordinarily gentle and courteous could, when the madness seized him, rage like a wild beast; why one who bore peerless martial prowess lived each day in anguish.

Xie Xun said, “In time, word reached me of the Dragon Saber’s whereabouts, and I hastened to Wang Pan Island³ to seize it. Fifth Sister, your father⁴ was once my closest friend—the Eagle King and the Lion King,⁵ their names spoken in the same breath throughout the realm—yet in the end we turned against each other. The tangled threads of that falling-out touch upon others, and I cannot tell you of them here. Before I obtained the saber, I had bent every effort toward finding Chengkun. After I obtained it, I feared instead that he would find me, and so I sought the most remote and hidden place I could find, that I might slowly unravel the saber’s secret. It was only to prevent you from revealing my whereabouts that I brought you along. Who could have foreseen that nine years would slip away in an instant? Xie Xun, oh Xie Xun—and still you have accomplished nothing!”

Zhang Cuishan said, “When Master Kongjian spoke his dying words, perhaps he did not finish his thought. He said, ‘Unless you can find the secret within the Dragon Saber…’ He may well have meant something else entirely.” Xie Xun said, “In these nine years, I have entertained every notion—however preposterous, however fantastical—yet none accords with his words. The saber conceals a great secret; of that there can be no doubt. But I have exhausted my wits and still cannot fathom what it is. In all my careful examination of the blade, I have found only that the edge near the hilt bears a small notch, unlike any ordinary dao. But this notch holds nothing remarkable, nor does it serve any special purpose in swordsmanship.”

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After that night of revelation, Xie Xun spoke no more of these matters. But his drilling of Wuji’s martial training grew harsh beyond all precedent. The boy was only nine years old; clever though he was, to absorb in so short a time the rarest and most esoteric martial arts that Xie Xun possessed was beyond any child’s capacity. Xie Xun also taught him the methods for redirecting sealed acupoints⁶ and breaking free of acupoint blockages—techniques that ranked among the most advanced in all of martial scholarship. Wuji could not yet identify his own acupoints, let alone possess any foundation in neigong. How was he to learn such things? Xie Xun beat and scolded him without the slightest mercy.

Yin Susu often saw her son covered in bruises—a patch of blue here, a patch of black there—and her heart ached. She said to Xie Xun, “Elder Brother, your divine martial arts are peerless. In three or five years, how could Wuji hope to master them? On this forsaken island, the days stretch without end. There is no harm in teaching him slowly.” Xie Xun said, “I am not teaching him to practise. I am teaching him to commit every word to memory.” Yin Susu said in surprise, “You do not mean for Wuji to actually train?” Xie Xun said, “If he were to practise each move and form one by one, how would there ever be time enough? I need only for him to remember—to fix it all firmly in his mind.”

Yin Susu could not grasp his meaning, but she knew this sworn brother of theirs did everything in ways that defied expectation, and so she let him be. Yet each time she saw the welts and bruises covering her child’s body, she would gather him close and comfort him. Wuji, for his part, understood well enough. “Mama, Godfather only wants the best for me. The harder he strikes, the better I remember.”

Thus another half-year and more passed. One morning, Xie Xun said suddenly, “Fifth Brother, Fifth Sister, in four months the wind will shift to the south. Let us begin building a raft today.”

Zhang Cuishan felt a surge of mingled shock and joy. “You mean to build a raft and sail back to China?”

Xie Xun replied coldly, “That depends on whether heaven sees fit to show us mercy. As the saying goes, ‘Man proposes; heaven disposes.’⁷ If we succeed, we go home. If we fail, we drown in the open sea.”

Had the choice been Yin Susu’s, she would have remained content on this island paradise, carefree as an immortal, rather than risk such peril. But when she thought of how Wuji would one day need to take a wife and carry on the family name, and that for him to spend his entire life buried on a forsaken island would be a terrible waste, she threw herself with good cheer into building the raft alongside the others. The island was rich in towering ancient trees that, having grown in a land of ice and fire, had put on their wood with painful slowness over centuries. Their timber was dense as iron and hard as stone. Xie Xun and Zhang Cuishan laboured day after day, felling trees and shaping logs, while Yin Susu wove sailcloth from tree sinew and animal hides and twisted the cordage for the rigging. Wuji ran back and forth, carrying and fetching. Formidable as Xie Xun’s and Zhang Cuishan’s martial arts were, and though Yin Susu herself had long since ceased to be the delicate young woman she once was, lacking proper tools the work of building that great raft repaid their effort many times over.

Throughout the construction, Xie Xun kept Wuji constantly at his side, drilling and testing him on everything he had learnt. Zhang Cuishan and Yin Susu no longer withdrew during these sessions, and what they overheard was godfather and godson exchanging questions and answers that consisted entirely of mnemonic verses and oral formulae. Xie Xun even required Wuji to memorise every form of various dao and jian techniques, reciting them as though they were passages from the classics. This method of “teaching martial arts through rote scholarship” was strange enough, but stranger still was that Xie Xun offered not a word of explanation—like some inept village schoolmaster forcing a child to parrot the Analerta and the Book of Odes,⁸ swallowing each passage whole without the faintest understanding. Yin Susu listened from the sidelines and sometimes could not help pitying her son. She thought: never mind a child—even a grown man steeped in martial learning could not possibly remember so many oral formulae and sequences of forms. And without practising them, what good was rote memorisation? Could one defeat an enemy merely by reciting the names of moves aloud? Yet whenever Wuji misremembered so much as a single word, Xie Xun’s palm cracked across his face. Though there was no neili behind the blow, it was enough to leave one side of the boy’s cheek swollen and flushed for half the day.

The great raft took over two months to complete, and the raising of the main mast and secondary mast consumed another half a month. After that came the hunting and salting of meat and the sewing of hide bags to store fresh water. By the time all was in readiness, the days had grown very short and the nights very long, but the wind had not yet shifted. The three of them built a thatch shelter by the shore to shield the raft, and waited for the wind to turn so they could put to sea.

During this time, Xie Xun would not be parted from Wuji for a single moment—not even at night, when he insisted the boy sleep beside him. Zhang Cuishan and his wife observed how he treated their son with both fierce tenderness and stern severity, and could only exchange rueful smiles.

One night, Zhang Cuishan was roused from sleep by a change in the wind. He sat up and listened: the wind was indeed blowing from the north. He shook Yin Susu awake. “Listen!” Yin Susu, still half adrift in dreams, had not yet answered when Xie Xun’s voice rang out from beyond their shelter. “The north wind! The north wind has come!” His words carried what sounded almost like the edge of tears, and heard in the dead of night, they were piercingly raw and bitter.

The next morning, husband and wife set about their final preparations in high spirits, but after ten years on Ice Fire Island,⁹ the prospect of departure stirred in them a strange reluctance to leave. When all the food and provisions had been loaded onto the raft, it was already midday. The three of them pushed the raft together into the sea. Wuji was the first to leap aboard, followed by Yin Susu.

Zhang Cuishan clasped Xie Xun’s hand. “Elder Brother, the raft is six feet out. Let us jump aboard together!”

Xie Xun said, “Fifth Brother, you and I part here forever. I wish you well.”

Zhang Cuishan felt his heart lurch as though he had been struck a savage blow to the chest. “You… you…” Xie Xun said, “You are kind-hearted by nature, and by rights you should enjoy boundless good fortune. But you hold too rigidly to questions of right and wrong, and I fear that will bring you no end of hardship. In all things, take care.” He paused, then continued, “Wuji has a broad and generous spirit. In time, I think he will prove far more flexible and accommodating than you in his dealings with the world. Fifth Sister, though a woman, is not one to suffer at another’s hands. The one I worry for… is you.”

Zhang Cuishan grew more alarmed and grief-stricken with every word. His voice trembling, he said, “Elder Brother, what are you saying? You will not… you will not come with us?”

Xie Xun said, “I told you this years ago. Have you forgotten?”

Footnotes

1. 灵台穴 – língtái xué. An acupoint on the spine between the shoulder blades, associated with the governing vessel meridian. In martial arts practice, channelling neili into this point can sustain a person’s vital functions. ↩

2. Translator’s note: Kongjian’s dying words—‘刀中的秘……’ (the secret within the dao)—are cut short. The unfinished word is 秘密 (mìmì, “secret”), leaving Xie Xun to deduce that the Dragon Saber conceals something of extraordinary significance, though Kongjian never reveals what. ↩

3. 王盘山 – Wáng Pán Shān. Wang Pan Island, a small island in the East China Sea where a gathering of martial artists convened to seize the Dragon Saber. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. Yin Susu’s father is Yin Tianzheng (殷天正 – Yīn Tiānzhèng), his name meaning “Yin Heavenly Justice.” He bears the title of the White-Browed Eagle King (白眉鹰王 – Báiméi Yīng Wáng), one of the Four Guardian Kings of the Ming Cult. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 鹰王狮王 – Yīng Wáng Shī Wáng. The Eagle King and the Lion King, two of the Four Guardian Kings (四大护教法王 – sì dà hùjiào fǎwáng) of the Ming Cult. The Eagle King is Yin Tianzheng; the Lion King is Xie Xun himself, whose full title is the Golden-Maned Lion King (金毛狮王 – Jīnmáo Shī Wáng). See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. Translator’s note: Acupoint redirection (转换穴道) and acupoint unsealing (冲解被封穴道) are advanced techniques enabling a martial artist to reroute the flow of qi through alternate meridians when primary acupoints have been sealed by an opponent, or to break free of such blockages entirely. Both require deep knowledge of the body’s meridian pathways and substantial neigong cultivation. ↩

7. 谋事在人，成事在天 – móushì zàirén, chéngshì zàitiān. A proverb meaning that while mortals may lay their plans, the outcome rests with heaven. ↩

8. Translator’s note: A reference to the traditional method of education in imperial China, where young students were required to memorise Confucian classics such as the Analects (论语 – Lúnyǔ) and the Book of Odes (诗经 – Shījīng) by rote, often long before they could comprehend their meaning. ↩

9. 冰火岛 – Bīng Huǒ Dǎo. Literally ice fire island. A remote volcanic island in the polar seas, so named because its southern face is heated by subterranean volcanic activity while its northern face is locked in perpetual ice. The island where Xie Xun, Zhang Cuishan, Yin Susu, and Wuji were stranded for ten years. ↩