Entering the Fortress, Jianghu Sects

... "Phew!" Only after shaking off the pursuers behind him did Lian Youming lean against a tree to catch his breath. Yet even as he panted, his left hand supporting the young woman's waist was quietly exerting force, poised as though ready to kill her on the spot. "Ugh, that hurts!" To his surprise, the girl's face blanched. Trembling in pain from head to toe, she instinctively curled in on herself. Seeing this, Lian Youming's brow furrowed, thoroughly bewildered. *Something's not right.* *She really is an ordinary person.* With a grip like that putting her at an absolute disadvantage, she hadn't shown the slightest martial reaction—no release of breath, no shift of sinew or muscle. She was as ordinary as ordinary could be. *Could I have guessed wrong?* After a moment's hesitation, Lian Youming set the girl down gingerly, as if facing a formidable foe. Yet to his surprise, she slid down with complete obedience. Her tear-filled eyes stared up at him reproachfully, yet her hands still clutched his sleeve, as if terrified of being abandoned in these deep, ancient woods. *Who could withstand that?* Lian Youming had originally intended to probe further, but remembering that they were not yet out of danger and looking at her tear-streaked face, he sighed. "I'm sorry... I thought you were..." Before he could finish, beasts were seen scattering through the woods behind them once more, as if spooked by intruders. "How are they keeping up so closely?" Lian Youming assumed the pursuers had caught up again, but in the next second— *Roar!* An earth-shattering tiger's roar erupted from the forest wilderness, shaking the mountains into terrified silence and startling a hundred birds into flight. An intangible aura of overwhelming ferocity seemed to sweep in all directions, making Lian Youming's scalp tingle and the hairs all over his body stand uncontrollably on end. As a cold gust swept past, his back broke into a cold sweat. Lian Youming froze for several seconds, then gave a sudden start. "There are tigers on this mountain?" The moment he asked, he felt foolish. What was strange about there being tigers in the Changbai Mountains? The girl was also scared pale. Lian Youming's expression turned grim. "Damn it, the White Lotus Sect's beast-driving technique... How are we supposed to get down now?" He took a deep breath and realized that a strange stench of blood had crept into the mountain wind. With a forlorn expression, the girl asked, "What do we do now?" "Deal with it!" Lian Youming hoisted the girl onto his back and sprinted into the twilight, not caring what Li Da planned to do next—staying alive was what mattered first. With that single tiger roar, the wild beasts in the woods went mad, scattering in all directions like a surging tide. Fortunately, the tiger did not seem to be headed for them. Lian Youming scanned his surroundings rapidly and faintly heard several cries of alarm in the distance. It seemed that just as Li Da had anticipated, quite a few people had arrived on this excursion; whether they were friends or foes, good or evil, remained unknown. Such a situation was far from simple. For no apparent reason, Lian Youming felt a sense of immense peril. Taking advantage of the remaining daylight, he ran another stretch, getting his bearings along the way. Just then, the girl lying on his back pointed ahead and said, "We'll reach Heifengkou soon. The wind gets very strong there." Unbeknownst to them, they had already ascended the northern slope. Feeling the powerful mountain wind, Lian Youming grew even more puzzled. Since the girl knew the way, perhaps she really was a villager gathering herbs on the mountain. "Hold tight," he warned, climbing straight up along the mountain trail. Lian Youming did not head for Heifengkou. Knowing nothing of the local names and colloquial landmarks on this mountain, he could only rely on the markings on his map to find similar terrain. "Do you know if there's a place called the Erman's birch forest around here?" The girl hastily pointed higher up the mountain. "Over there!" Lian Youming looked in that direction, caught sight of a dense, shadowy thicket of trees, and charged forward in huge strides. As the last light of day faded completely, a cold moon hung on the horizon. The forest was pitch-black, save for the bright moonlight filtering through the stunted, twisted branches and sparse leaves onto their faces. Holding his breath, Lian Youming carried the girl on his back and groped his way forward step by step. Yet it was as if they had poked a hornet's nest. Many wild animals were nestled in the woods, likely sheltering here to escape the mosquitoes and horseflies lower down the mountain. Wild boars and red deer, startled by human intruders, suddenly sprang out one after another, crashing from the east and bolting from the west in utter chaos. After circling around twice, Lian Youming finally stopped before a verdant thicket, where a half-concealed, oddly shaped boulder stood about waist-high. Beside it lay two silly roe deer, too lazy even to budge, merely craning their necks and staring at the pair with wide eyes. "What are you staring at? Once I'm out of this mess, I'll eat you both," Lian Youming muttered, swatting each of them once to shoo them away. "What are you looking for?" the girl asked, puzzled. Lian Youming did not answer. With eyes flickering, he gripped his military dagger and began circling the boulder, slashing away at the Erman's birch growing around it. Once he had cleared an open space, he shoved the boulder over with all his might. As the rock toppled, the moonlight revealed a rust-encrusted circular metal plate suddenly exposed to the air. Dirt was heaped on top of it, strewn with rotting husks and leaves, and in its center sat a massive ring, heavily corroded with rust. Lian Youming brushed away the accumulated dirt, took a deep breath, gripped the ring, and hauled upward with all his strength. Accompanied by a harsh, grating screech of grinding metal, a pitch-black, cavernous circular entrance appeared before the two of them. Along the path they had come from, the woods fell abruptly dead silent. Then a gust of bloody wind arose, and a spectral, massive figure, carrying half of a dripping, bloody corpse in its jaws, stepped slowly out of the darkness and into the moonlight. What a magnificent beast of a tiger. Lian Youming's face froze and his hands and feet turned icy cold, but his gaze fell behind the tiger. A person stood there, their face indistinct, discernible only by silhouette as a woman. Beyond that, figures seemed to lurk in the surrounding woods in every direction. Sure enough, they had all been watching from the shadows. There was no running away now. Lian Youming suddenly looked at the young woman beside him, his eyes narrowing. He truly could not be certain of her identity. And ghost knew where that bastard Li Da had run off to. Things having reached this point, there was no retreat. Who could have imagined—even Lian Youming himself had never dreamed—that as an educated youth sent down to the countryside, a student who only a year ago was pondering how to get ahead in life, he would end up swept so blindly into such a momentous conflict in the jianghu without knowing a single person involved. It truly was his wretched luck. "Li Da, fuck your eight generations of ancestors!" Lian Youming glanced at the pitch-black entrance, took a deep, unhurried breath, bellowed a curse toward the heavens, and grabbed the girl's wrist. "I don't care whether you're good or evil. If you're innocent, I'll die ahead of you down there; if you're faking it, we'll die together." With that, amid the girl's startled shriek, Lian Youming leaped forward, plunging straight into the fortress entrance. Shortly after the two leapt in, several figures emerged from the shadows one after another. Yet looking down into that bottomless opening, the crowd neither attacked nor made a move to enter, seeming instead to observe, ponder, and hold each other in a tense standoff. "You two from the Xingyi Sect, why aren't you dealing with your own sect affairs instead of butting in here? That Xue Hen is on a killing spree, yet you still have the mind to covet other things." "Fuck your mother, so you know it's our private business! If I remember right, Xie Tianhong was from your Eagle Claw Sect, wasn't he? After producing a traitor like that, you have the nerve to shamelessly talk down to us!" "So what if we had a traitor? Didn't Baguamen produce one too? And Chen-style boxing, Mantis Sect, Taiji School—even Ziranmen had people join the White Lotus Sect... Among those Thirty-Six Heavenly Venerables, which one isn't an expert from the various sects and schools of the jianghu? Shaolin and Wudang are no exceptions either. None of us has the right to mock anyone else." ... The crowd traded barbed words back and forth, arguing incessantly. But a few meters below the entrance, the young man was bracing himself with hands and feet against the walls, listening pensively to the commotion above. *So Xie Laosan was originally from the Eagle Claw Sect.* *The Thirty-Six Heavenly Venerables?* Lian Youming couldn't help recalling how Xie Laosan had once claimed to be one of the thirty-six consecrators of the White Lotus Sect. *Could they all have come for that dose of aged medicine?* *To prolong their lifespans?* Lian Youming looked again at the girl clinging to him. Terrified like a startled rabbit, she held on for dear life, trembling violently. Suddenly, he pulled his limbs inward and slid rapidly down the smooth stone shaft.