Zhou Weixin

Zhou Weixin

Contents

Zhou Weixin (simplified: 周威信, traditional: 周威信, pinyin: Zhōu Wēixìn, jyutping: zau1 wai1 seon3) is the escort chief of the Weixin Armed Escort of Xi’an Prefecture, known in the jianghu as the Iron Whip that Quells All Directions. Ordered by the Sichuan-Shaanxi Governor-General Liu Yuyi to carry the Mandarin Duck Blades to Beijing in secret, he spends the novella losing them.

Biography

The commission

Liu Yuyi receives Zhou at his residence, the highest official Zhou has ever met, and orders him to take the blades to the Emperor in Beijing without letting word leak, promising a handsome reward. Four of the Governor-General’s guards travel with the convoy as escorts, to support Zhou and to watch him, and the day before it sets out, the Governor-General’s men move all twelve of his family, his elderly mother, wife, concubines and children, into the barracks as hostages. Zhou carries the blades on his back, wrapped in yellow cloth under the Governor-General’s seal, and for cover openly escorts a hundred thousand liang of silver for the salt merchant Wang Derong. In a pine forest, the Four Xias of Taiyue block his road.1

On the road

When the Four Xias demand his treasures, Zhou sends his escorts and guards against them and gallops off with the blades, calling back that he is scouting for an ambush. Xiaoyaozi hits his whip with a muddy shoe, which Zhou takes for a master’s mercy. After his men drive the four away, he tells them he routed ten bandits outside the forest, then puts a throwing arrow into the buttock of the merchant Wang, who is hiding in a thicket.2

At the Fen’an Inn in Guanshui, his escorts tell him he has muttered “Mandarin Duck Blades” in his sleep every night since Xi’an, and Xiao Zhonghui, listening at the window, learns what he carries.3 The next day, an old blind man keeps pace with the convoy and beats the escorts who attack him. Zhou leaves them to it and rides into a forest, where Lin Yulong and Ren Feiyan, searching for their son, unhorse him and put their dao to his neck.4

Asked what he is clutching, Zhou blurts out “Mandarin Duck Blades!” Xiao Zhonghui cuts the bundle from his back, and the blind man seizes the blades from her, then meets Zhou’s Sweeping Across an Army from the Eighteen Whips of Huyan with the same move, using the sheathed blade, and asks whether he has learnt the last move. Zhou realises the man is his shibo Zhuo Tianxiong, the leader of the Seven Greats of the Imperial Court, whom he has never met. Zhuo tells him the Emperor sent him, and that he has trailed the convoy since Xi’an.5 When Yuan Guannan smears Zhuo’s hand with ink he claims is poison and snatches the blades from Zhou, Zhou runs after his fleeing shibo.6

At the Xiao mansion

On Xiao Banhe’s fiftieth birthday, Zhuo catches Xiao Zhonghui outside the Xiao mansion and has Zhou take the short Yang blade from her waist.7 In the birthday hall, Zhou holds the blade at her back while Zhuo demands the long Yuan blade in exchange for her. When Yuan Guannan showers the hall with gold leaf from his books, Zhou keeps his hands on the blade rather than reach for the gold. Yuan strikes him in the face with a gold-filled book, and Xiao Zhonghui slaps him and twists the Yang blade from his grip.8

Personality and traits

Zhou measures every decision against a jianghu saying, and has one ready for nearly every turn of events, including his own cowardice. He is cautious to the point of abandoning his men whenever a fight turns dangerous, keeps the blades on his back rather than in a cart, and lies readily to save face. The mission weighs on him so heavily that he gives away his secret twice: in his sleep, and with a dao at his neck.

Martial arts abilities

Zhou fights with a pair of iron whips. Against the Four Xias, he deflects Gai Yiming’s Emei piercers with Taking the Spear in Peach Garden and turns back Hua Jianying’s meteor hammer with Night Raid on Three Forts, and he also throws throwing arrows and darts.2

His school’s whip style is the Eighteen Whips of Huyan, of which only seventeen moves have been handed down. His shifu told him that the last, Breaking Ten Spears with One Whip, relies on neili alone, and that only his shibo had the cultivation for it. When Zhuo Tianxiong answers his whip with a sheathed blade, the force jars the sixteen-pound whip from his hand and splits the skin between his thumb and forefinger.5

See also

Footnotes

  1. See Part 1. ↩

  2. See Part 2. ↩ ↩2

  3. See Part 4. ↩

  4. See Part 6. ↩

  5. See Part 7. ↩ ↩2

  6. See Part 8. ↩

  7. See Part 10. ↩

  8. See Part 11. ↩

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