August, the warmest month in the Arctic.
The sun seemed to crouch eternally at the far edge of the horizon.
The Arctic research vessel Longji moved slowly across an endless expanse of ice. The harsh sound of icebreaking at its bow went on without pause.
At noon, the temperature rose to minus seven degrees Celsius. Unlike previous days, the howling wind had died down, and first mate Zhao Meng notified all expedition members to go on deck to stretch their legs and get some air.
Zhao Meng was Li Weiyi’s senior martial brother. In his early years, he had trained at the sect for six years in fist and palm techniques; later he joined the navy and rose step by step to the rank of field-grade officer. He had extensive seamanship experience. This time he had set out with the research ship, responsible for personnel management, hull maintenance, and other matters.
Having been cooped up in the cabins for several days, everyone was excited to come on deck.
Some spread their arms and breathed deeply; some shouted loudly; some picked up the snow and ice that had not been cleared from the deck and threw it into the distance.
The accompanying reporter was recording broadcast material.
The meteorological researchers launched a weather balloon.
...
“Auspicious snow awes a thousand miles; all clouds darken the nine heavens.”
“The land seems a moonlit night; the mountains like white clouds at dawn.”
Among the seven or eight students who had come out of the cabin with Professor Xu, one short fellow was moved by the scene and loudly recited poetry in public, puffing out clouds of white mist. No one mocked or felt embarrassed; they all shared the feeling and were high-spirited.
To be selected while still at university to go on a polar expedition—this naturally added a bold, colorful stroke to one’s résumé.
Li Weiyi sat alone on the stairway at the stern, completely at odds with the laughter and roughhousing and grand ambition over there.
His face was handsome and refined, his nose high and straight, and his lips were slightly cracked from the cold. He had just finished his freshman year and was much younger than the master’s students led by Professor Xu.
From the collar of his thick orange cold-weather suit, he took out an ancient pendant hanging around his neck. He stroked the patterns on it, and a rush of longing came over him. His face overflowed with bitterness and grief.
This ancient pendant was called the “Daozu Taiji Fish,” the sect master’s token of the Chan Sect, said to have been passed down from the era of King Wen of Zhou.
Two bronze fish were joined head to tail to form a Taiji seal.
The scale carvings were very clear, but one of the fish’s eyes was missing.
The two fish’s eyes represented the lesser yin and lesser yang of the Taiji. The remaining one was faintly blue-green, the size of a bean. Its material was quite unusual—like jade, like stone, like bone—and it had a strong air of antiquity.
The old sect master had said it was Daozu’s brow bone.
Two months ago, as the old sect master was dying, he passed the Daozu Taiji Fish to Li Weiyi, who then naturally became the new-generation sect master of the Chan Sect.
Li Weiyi had lost his parents when he was very young and had grown up with the old sect master, as close as grandfather and grandson.
The old sect master’s death had dealt him a heavy blow.
At that time, Zhao Meng had happened to be there, having returned to the mountain to visit their master. On his deathbed, the old sect master entrusted Li Weiyi to him. Seeing that Li Weiyi was trapped in grief and could not get out of it for several days, Zhao Meng suggested taking him out to cheer up.
Only after boarding the research ship did Li Weiyi learn that the place his senior brother had taken him to relax was the distant Arctic.
“Weiyi, are you thinking about the old sect master again?”
Zhao Meng walked over from the deck.
He was a burly man, one meter eighty-six tall, with a square face, large ears, and a thick, full beard. With his already bulky cold-weather gear, his arms were as thick as pillars, and he had the imposing presence of a mountain, very masculine.
Li Weiyi quickly composed himself, raised his head, and revealed a pair of clear, bright eyes. “Senior brother, you don’t need to worry. I’m fine. It has been two months. Anything can fade and be accepted with time.”
He was strong inside, able to face the storms of life alone. He was not the kind of person to pass his negative emotions on to family and friends.
“That’s good.”
Zhao Meng plopped down beside Li Weiyi, took out a cigarette pack, pulled one out, lit it, and said, “Talk with others more, don’t bottle yourself up. Want one?”
Li Weiyi shook his head slightly and asked, “Senior brother, what happened on the ship last night?”
Li Weiyi had been assigned by Zhao Meng to the security group, responsible for basic safety and order on the fifth level of the ship. Last night it seemed something major had happened in the lower cabins: there was a long burst of running and shouting, and even the hull shook several times.
He had wanted to go down and check, but was stopped. His curiosity had remained.
Zhao Meng said, “It’s no big deal! Rumor has it that Lab 705 caught fire, but it was quickly extinguished.”
Lab 705 was located on the ship’s lowest level and conducted some secret experiment. Its security level was high, and it was not Zhao Meng’s responsibility.
Li Weiyi had heard people mention that armed guards stood outside the lab.
“Those people are so secretive. They won’t even let us inspect whether there are dangerous, explosive items. Please don’t let any trouble happen.” Zhao Meng looked worried and could not help complaining.
They said it was a fire, but the hull clearly shook. They were obviously hiding something.
The Longji was over a hundred meters long and nearly fifteen thousand tons.
How much force would it take to shake it?
Remembering the real reason he had come to find Li Weiyi, Zhao Meng turned serious. “Have Xie Jin and the others been giving you a hard time?”
“No.”
Li Weiyi shook his head slightly.
Zhao Meng’s broad, thick palm landed on his shoulder. “Here with your senior brother, you can say whatever you want. The kinder and more tolerant you are, the more they will push you.”
Li Weiyi thought for a moment. “Everyone who can join the research ship’s security group is an elite selected through one round after another. I’m just someone brought in through connections, and I’m still just a university student, yet I became a member of the security group, was assigned to the best level, and have my own room. If I were them, I would certainly be resentful too. So I don’t blame them.”
Zhao Meng took a deep drag, not stopping until the ember nearly reached the filter, and thick, acrid smoke poured from his nostrils. “What do you mean, someone brought in through connections? Don’t I know your strength? When you were little... I remember you were only this tall. When I was practicing martial arts under the old locust tree, you were beside me grunting and waving your little fists. Master used to say my talent didn’t even reach your knees.”
Li Weiyi smiled. “You know how exaggerated the old man’s mouth is.”
“Cut it out! Two years ago when I came back to the mountain and sparred with you, I was already no match for you. Seventeen and eighteen are exactly the years of rapid physical and blood-qi growth. Do you think I would dare offer to spar now?” Zhao Meng said.
In martial arts, Li Weiyi naturally had great confidence, but when he thought of what Master had once said—“The martial way, the martial way: only martial remains, and the way is gone. In this age, even the martial is nearly gone”—his confidence was inevitably somewhat dented.
Only the pursuit of the martial way and the dream of transcending the ordinary that lingered in his mind had not faded; instead, they grew stronger.
He was determined to make something of himself in this age when the martial way had been abandoned.
After a long thought, Li Weiyi said, “It is against the rules for me to be in the security group. Senior brother, don’t make things difficult for them. I can solve it myself.”
“You...”
Zhao Meng knew that this junior brother of his had grown up on the mountain and been a model student at school. His heart was too kind, and he did not understand the malice in people’s hearts, so he patiently explained, “I recruited you specially. Even if you were not my junior brother, your strength would fully qualify. That is the rule!”
“Next time Xie Jin and the others give you trouble, don’t endure it. Just teach them a lesson directly.”
Zhao Meng added, “Speaking of this, it has something to do with me too. When I was competing for the position of first mate, I had a rather big conflict with Xie Tianshu. He probably stirred this up.”
Xie Tianshu was the second mate of this research ship, responsible for security, medical care, and so on.
A member of the expedition hurried over. “Brother Meng, the captain has something urgent. He wants you to come over quickly.”
“I mentioned your situation to the captain. You don’t even have to consider yourself a member of the security group. Just treat this as a trip to travel and relax.”
Zhao Meng gave Li Weiyi a few more instructions before following the member to the bridge.
...
“Did you know, the Arctic Ocean is the North Sea of myth and legend. In ancient times, the land was wild and untamed; the various tribes of gods, demons, and monsters fought endlessly. After the Chiyou tribe was defeated, the Jiuli remnants fled into the North Sea.”
“The North Sea is also called Beiming. It is said to be the entrance from the human world to the underworld. Some say only through the North Sea can one reach the true human world.”
Professor Xu and his group of master’s students walked along the passage by the ship’s side toward the stern, where Li Weiyi was.
The short fellow who had recited the poem earlier was a social butterfly. He talked nonstop, telling two pretty female students the myths about the North Sea.
Since departure, they had been at sea for more than a month. Everyone was already bored stiff. Hearing such bizarre and absurd stories, and seeing the endless expanse of ice that itself could inspire endless imagination, they kept laughing and discussing.
One fair-skinned female student with round, bright eyes said, “Beiming, I know! In Beiming there is a fish, and its name is Kun. Kun is so vast that no one knows how many thousands of li it spans. It is written in Zhuangzi’s ‘Free and Easy Wandering’!”
Another female student deliberately teased, “If there really were a fish thousands of li long, even the Arctic Ocean wouldn’t give it room to move.”
Professor Xu and this group of students were responsible for marine biology research and for extracting Arctic bacterial strains and marine genetic specimens. Their tasks were varied and heavy.
“A thousand li of silver vastness, the endless eternity of the polar day. A landscape this magnificent can only be seen in the polar regions. Let’s take a group photo.”
“Sure, it will be very memorable.”
“Young man, could you take a photo for us?”
Li Weiyi looked at the camera the female student had handed him, then raised his eyes to meet her round, moon-bright gaze. He nodded slightly, put the Daozu Taiji Fish into his cold-weather suit, got up, and walked down the stairs to take a group photo for them.
“Please take several.”
A crowd of male and female students clustered Professor Xu in the middle by the ship’s railing and struck various poses.
“Click!”
The shutter was pressed again and again.
Suddenly Li Weiyi sensed something was wrong and discovered something.
He pulled up the photo he had just taken, zoomed in, and examined it carefully. His pupils contracted sharply.
“What’s wrong, young man?” the female student asked curiously.
Li Weiyi handed the camera over and let them see it themselves.
He himself looked toward the distant snow ridge.
The boundless snowy plain was flat land like forged silver, without any grass or trees—awe-inspiring and desolate.
On the snow ridge several kilometers away, a huge purple-black figure was moving rapidly.
“A bear? What a strange bear-like creature...”
The female student was startled, staring at the photo on the camera.
“Let me see. Why is the bear purple-black? Aren’t polar bears white? Could a new species have appeared in the Arctic?”
“Don’t you think this bear is strange? It looks scrawny, but its body is unusually huge.”
While they gathered to study the photo, the strange bear-like creature in the distance was charging down the snow ridge toward the research ship at extraordinary speed.
It was too fast!
It ran across the ice like a car, and each time its paws landed, it kicked up a lot of ice fragments. Even from far away, one could faintly hear thunder-like running.
“Something is wrong. How can it be so fast?” Li Weiyi narrowed his eyes and realized there was danger.
The strange purple-black bear-like creature was astonishingly large—four or five times the size of an adult polar bear.
It was absolutely a new species not found on Earth.
In just one minute, it ran nearly two kilometers.
Its target was clear: the research ship.
“It’s coming for us.”
Li Weiyi whispered, then looked toward the deck and shouted, “Everyone, get back inside! There’s danger!”
“What terrifying speed! Even a cheetah at full sprint might not be that fast.”
Professor Xu and seven or eight young students were nearby. Some were worried; some were panicked.
From the research ship’s broadcast system came the captain’s voice: “All expedition members, please return to your cabins immediately. Security group members, please secure the cabin doors.”
“All expedition members, please return to your cabins immediately...”
A harsh horn blared through the entire research ship.