Where the west wind swept past, a fierce horse broke into a hard gallop.
A tall, powerfully built man could be seen riding across the vast and desolate land.
His name was Mu Liyan, and he was a spy of the Five Spirits Cult.
Twelve years ago, acting on the direct orders of the former cult leader, Yi Shixiong, he had infiltrated the Justice Sect, starting as the lowest of ordinary disciples, waiting for an opening to get close to Shen Youran, and charged with watching his every move.
And now, with Shen Youran's death, his mission had finally come to an end.
Riding a thousand-li horse supplied by his fellow cult members, with a bundle on his back that held Shen Youran's severed head, he pressed on day and night toward the Five Spirits Cult's present headquarters—Zhenling Mountain.
Ever since Yi Shixiong's death and the destruction of the old headquarters eleven years ago, the Five Spirits Cult had been gravely crippled, and had lain hidden ever since.
But the Five Spirits Cult was not like the Tianqi Gang. They had not risen on personal worship, nor on any single leader whose martial skill was exceptional; what they relied on was their doctrine, their faith.
Once a person has faith, he becomes very easy to control.
They can cast aside right and wrong, logic, even life and death, and without a backward glance do things that ordinary men find inconceivable.
It makes no difference if the cult leader dies or the headquarters burns—so long as the doctrine survives, fresh blood will always be drawn in.
Besides, the Five Spirits Cult of those years had not been wiped out to the last man. A great many members who happened to be away on assignments when the thirteen sects closed in had never died in that battle.
What's more, another son of cult leader Yi Shixiong had not died either.
That child had been only five years old back then. His name was Yi Shiqing.
The reason he had not been at the cult's headquarters was that Yi Shixiong did not dare keep him close.
Even before the child was born, strange phenomena had begun to occur. From the day his mother's pregnancy was confirmed, birds fell dead and insects died outside the house where she lived, every single day. Some wild dogs and jackals, catching the smell, came to eat the birds' corpses, but the moment they came near that house they were frightened into wailing howls, and turned tail and fled.
The night Yi Shiqing was born, a violent wind howled and a heavenly dog devoured the moon.
The wind was like a bleak, killing lament.
The night was like a curtain of the deepest black lacquer.
It was on just such a pitch-black night that he came into this world.
Yi Shiqing's mother died in childbirth that very night, and for the half month that followed, the wet nurses sent to feed him fell ill or died, one after another; doctors were fetched to examine the matter and could find nothing to explain it.
With no other recourse, Yi Shixiong turned to the local fangshi, asking them to come and see just what was wrong with this child.
The fangshi who came to the house either took one look at the child's face and collapsed where they stood, unable to rise, or else began to drift and rave incoherently after reading the child's Eight Characters. Not one of them offered a concrete explanation.
In the end Yi Shixiong lost his temper, seized one of the fangshi and demanded an answer, and the man, having no choice, told him plainly.
The fangshi said: this child's fate is monstrously ill-omened; he is a baleful star reborn. Anyone who becomes close to him will surely be cursed to death by him, and the closer they stand, the faster they die... Only by staying far from him, by keeping him at arm's length, can a man preserve his life. As for the child's own blood kin... wherever they go, that doom cannot be escaped.
To put it more bluntly: if you are his friend, then best you stop being his friend and stay far, far away; and if you are his kin, then even if you flee to the ends of the earth, so long as this child lives, the day will come when he curses you to death.
Yi Shixiong was a ruthless overlord of his generation, and a man who made his living playing at religion—how could he swallow such talk? Hearing it, he flew into a rage on the spot and killed the whole lot of fangshi to silence them.
And yet... the people of that era were, in the end, somewhat superstitious.
If you said he did not believe it, in truth some part of him half-believed; but on the surface he could not openly admit it.
This child had been, in effect, Yi Shixiong's “backup plan.” Why call it Plan B? Because his first son, Shen Youran, would not obey him.
Oh, that's right—back then Shen Youran was not called Shen Youran. He was Yi Shiyou. Shen Youran was the name he took later, after he escaped the Five Spirits Cult, adopting his mother's surname.
Yi Shixiong watched his first son grow up day by day treating him like an enemy, and it made him anxious, so he had taken hold of a woman from outside—decent-looking, with a few years of schooling behind her—and produced this second child.
Seeing that it was another boy, Yi Shixiong had been rather pleased at first; then this business came up, and he sank into gloom again.
But he was not the sort of man who would strangle his own second son over a few words from a fortune-teller. Even a tiger, for all its ferocity, does not eat its own cubs.
So he sent Yi Shiqing to a county town more than a hundred li from the Five Spirits Cult's headquarters, and every month dispatched two separate groups of different people to look after him, rotating them in shifts, making it rather like guarding an SCP.
Whether those fortune-tellers truly had some power, or it was simply coincidence... three or four years passed like that, and Yi Shixiong really did die.
From a certain angle, that matched the theory of “distance proportional to the day of death” rather neatly.
By the same logic, this child's half-brother on his father's side—Shen Youran—had left the Five Spirits Cult only a few years after the child's birth, and had always been separated from him by whole stretches of sky and earth, north and south; and he had lived more than ten years longer for it.
Of course, no one can say for certain about such things.
In any case, today Yi Shiqing, sixteen years old and no more, was already the cult leader of the Five Spirits Cult.
Whether he was a baleful star reborn could not be verified, but that he was a prodigy of the martial arts—that much was certain.
How much of a prodigy? Roughly on the same level as Lin Yuancheng.
What's more, Yi Shiqing had grown up training in the Five Spirits Cult's various superior martial arts since childhood; he had never so much as touched the odds-and-ends garbage techniques, which made his circumstances quite different from Lin Yuancheng's, who had never once encountered a renowned teacher.
And in mind and calculation, Yi Shiqing far outstripped his peers.
He had never had any “confidants.” Whoever he trusted, whoever he favored, died—so none of his subordinates dared form any private friendship with him beyond official business; they did not even dare to flatter him, for fear that once they had earned his good regard, they would be cursed to death for it.
A person who grows up in such a social environment naturally develops a very strong capacity for independent thought, and can handle the great majority of matters objectively and fairly, untouched by the influence of others.
If there was a drawback... it was that his character struck others as rather cold-blooded. He had almost no compassion and almost no empathy, and did not know what family affection, friendship, or love were.
Many words and decisions that ordinary people would consider exceedingly cruel, he could say or carry out with perfect ease.
So on this day, when Mu Liyan delivered his brother Shen Youran's severed head before him, he merely gave it a casual glance, then ordered someone to take the head away and burn it, seal the ashes in a jar, set it in the ancestral hall with a spirit tablet, and so give the ancestors some account of the matter.
Did you expect him to sigh over this brother he had never once met? That was not going to happen.
As for Mu Liyan, Yi Shiqing rewarded him heavily—so heavily that those around him could hardly make sense of it. Yi Shiqing promoted Mu Liyan straight to Deputy Banner Chief of the White Tiger Banner, granted him a hundred taels of gold and a precious saber, and further ordered the cult's elder in charge of transmitting martial arts to begin teaching Mu Liyan superior saber technique and internal energy from that very day.
Some who had followed him in the cult for many years, grinding away in mid-level posts all that time, had never received such treatment, and many were utterly baffled by it.
But puzzled as they were, not one of them questioned whether the cult leader's decision carried any private motive.
Because they all understood that even if the former cult leader, Yi Shixiong, might let personal likes and dislikes color the way he did things, the present Yi Shiqing would not.
Objectively speaking, Yi Shiqing's handling of it was indeed justified—if the reward for a mole who came home after years undercover did not amount to even this much, who would ever go undercover again?
Having faith was all very well, but speaking of faith in a place where everyone around you is a believer, and speaking of faith out there in the world, are two entirely different matters.
A spy's work was already under extraordinary pressure: adrift alone far from home, deceiving everyone around him every single day, not daring to talk in his sleep, and never knowing on what day his work might finally end...
Over these years the Five Spirits Cult had sent out so many spies. There were bound to be some exposed, some who surrendered, some who turned their coats... Those who, like Mu Liyan, could play “Lao Wu” for more than ten years and at the end retire with the mission accomplished were very few indeed.
If every organization behaved as they do in the movies, killing the donkey once the grinding was done, or handing their undercover men nothing but a perfectly ordinary reward when the mission ended, that would truly chill the heart of anyone who saw it.
Only such a rich reward could genuinely settle men's hearts. As for whether those who had spent long years serving in posts within the cult might resent it... that hardly mattered. They were right there under his nose—could they possibly turn the heavens over?
“Cult Leader, this subordinate has one more matter to report.” Having handed over his work and received his reward, Mu Liyan naturally had to raise the matter of Tang Fu.
“Speak.” Yi Shiqing sat there with his chin propped on one hand, without the slightest air of a cult leader; he was, after all, still a sixteen-year-old boy, and however clever, however deep his calculation, he would not have the steadiness of a middle-aged man.
“Banner Chief Tang asked me to bring you a message: that he still has some matters to deal with, and will likely have to stay out a few more days. He asks that the Cult Leader not worry.” Mu Liyan relayed Tang Fu's original words almost word for word.
“Heh...” Yi Shiqing gave a soft laugh on hearing it; in that instant he had already guessed what Tang Fu was up to, so he answered quickly. “Understood. Go and rest.”
“Yes, Cult Leader. Thank you, Cult Leader!” With that, Mu Liyan left.
Once Mu Liyan was out, an old man who had stood at Yi Shiqing's side the whole time, quietly observing, spoke up. “Cult Leader, that gu-refining art of Gu Qiying's is no small matter. If it truly fell into the hands of those righteous folk, I fear...”
“You mean... we send someone else to help Banner Chief Tang track it down?” Yi Shiqing took it up.
“That is precisely my meaning,” the old man said, deeply respectful. “I leave the decision to the Cult Leader.”
“Mm...” Yi Shiqing thought it over. “What you say... makes sense.” He suddenly smiled. “Old Tang is not much to look at, and he doesn't have a pleasing way of talking. Sending him to look into this... I really am a little uneasy about it.”
At that, he suddenly raised his voice. “Someone come—fetch Deputy Banner Chief Li.”
The Five Spirits Cult had what were called the Five Spirits Banners, corresponding respectively to the Five Spirits, the Five Elements, and the Five Directions.
The Azure Dragon Banner belonged to the east and to wood, and flew a green banner; the White Tiger Banner belonged to the west and to metal, and flew a white banner; the Vermilion Bird Banner belonged to the south and to fire, and flew a red banner; the Black Tortoise Banner belonged to the north and to water, and flew a blue banner; and the last, the Qilin Banner, belonged to the center and to earth, and flew a yellow banner.
These five banners were led each by one of the Five Great Banner Chiefs, and each Banner Chief might have two or three Deputy Banner Chiefs under him. These people were also among the few, apart from the cult leader himself, qualified to learn the Cult-Protecting Divine Art.
Note that it was not that a Banner Chief or Deputy Banner Chief could learn only one of the divine arts; rather, once you became a Deputy Banner Chief, then Azure Dragon Force, White Tiger Palm, Vermilion Bird Plume, Black Tortoise Armor, Qilin Finger... all five were open to you.
It was only that each banner had its own specialty. Suppose you made Deputy Banner Chief in the White Tiger Banner, studied a while, and found that what actually suited you best was the Vermilion Bird Plume; then the cult leader might well transfer you to the Vermilion Bird Banner, so that the Banner Chief there could teach you.
At present, the Deputy Banner Chief Li whom Yi Shiqing had summoned was Li Qiyu, a Deputy Banner Chief of the Black Tortoise Banner, whose hard, iron-bodied external training was the finest of all.
Of course, that was not actually the point of Yi Shiqing's calling her here. The point was... that besides being formidable in martial skill, she was also a beauty.
This world judges people by their looks; the beautiful find their way easier, the ugly struggle at every step—whether that is right or not, it is common sense and it is fact.
What Tang Fu might have to beat out of a man, or pry loose with a bit of silver, Li Qiyu could perhaps get with a single flutter of the eyes; places Tang Fu might fail to worm his way into even in disguise, Li Qiyu might simply walk into.
For that sort of quiet, undercover investigation, sending a beauty naturally meant half the effort and twice the result.
Before long, Li Qiyu, having received the summons, arrived.
Beautiful as she was, there was nothing the least bit ladylike about the way she walked. She came on with great sweeping strides, full of tigerish force, as though with every step she took she were already weighing whether to throw a punch the next second.
“Cult Leader. You sent for me.” Li Qiyu lifted her head, cupped her hands in salute, and spoke in a ringing voice, with the air of someone who did not hold the cult leader in any particular regard.
But it was not that she failed to respect the cult leader; she had simply always been this way, and Yi Shiqing and that old man... were both used to her manner.
On an ordinary day, if Li Qiyu sat still and did not speak, she was a beauty indeed—bright eyes and white teeth, natural grace, lovely as a flower, exquisite as jade, and touching to look at. And on top of that, women of that era dressed thickly; apart from a few special occupations, a decent woman hardly showed her arms. Even if Li Qiyu had a body of hard corded muscle and eight blocks of abdominal muscle under her clothes, no one could see it—they only knew that her face was beautiful.
Yet the moment she spoke or moved, she became the very image of a warrior general from the last years of the Eastern Han, in enormous contrast to that face of hers.
Of course, that was her most natural and most comfortable state. She was no fool, either; she could act, she could put on a show...
Even if you have never eaten pork, you have seen a pig run—she still knew how to play the proper lady. But she only bothered to put it on when it was called for, say, when she went out on an assignment; the rest of the time she could not be troubled to perform.
“Deputy Banner Chief Li, there is a matter I need you to go out for.” Yi Shiqing had already worked the whole plan through before she came, so he answered her directly. “Now, let me lay it out for you in detail...”
…………
Dusk, within the city of Luoyang.
Two days had passed since that great fire.
The smell of burning still had not cleared from the air.
And in the ruins of the Justice Sect—or, rather, of the Tianqi Gang's main headquarters—the last warmth left by that fire still lingered.
Even beggars did not want to come within half a step of the ruins, because the place had burned so utterly clean that one look was enough to tell nothing of value could possibly have survived.
Hiss... hiss...
No one noticed that among the broken walls and rubble near the south gate, something was making a very faint sound, like silk threads being spun out.
Had anyone at that moment dug away the layers of brick and tile and looked inside, they would have found... hidden in the shadow where the sunlight could not reach, a charred black corpse.
The charred outer skin of this “corpse” was seeping a strange oily grease, and many small raised lumps were crawling back and forth beneath its skin, as though some living thing were busy at work inside.
As time passed, threadlike strands began to appear across the corpse's surface—solid filaments like oil that had congealed. Slowly, these strands grew more numerous and thicker, layer upon layer, until they had wrapped the whole body into something like a cocoon...
Chapter 67