The Man Blocking the Road

Autumn's colors run deep. Parting brings its sorrow. A single cup of wine. A thousand feelings well. Deep autumn is a season of harvest, and also a season of parting. On this day, on the main road outside Luoyang, a carriage rolled slowly out. The one driving it was quite a character—he was the son of the "Eight Wastes Fist Sage," named Lei Buji. As the saying goes, an extraordinary man has an extraordinary look and extraordinary ability. Though Lei Buji was only sixteen this year, he was built like a burly, dark-faced man of thirty—so just imagine how capable he must be. Of course, when it came to ability, the two men sitting inside that carriage were even more formidable. One was named Sun Yixie; the other, Huang Donglai. At the "Youth Heroes Assembly" of the eighteenth year of Yongtai, which had just concluded not long before, one of them had taken fourth place and the other had made the top sixteen. These rankings... at first hearing they don't sound like much, but in truth the rankings weren't the point. The point was that their string of feats—"strangling the organizers," killing Gu Qiying by a scheme, crushing the Tianqi Gang, and cleverly rescuing the assembled heroes of the martial world—had left more than half the jianghu owing them an enormous debt of gratitude overnight. After this affair, the two of them went in an instant from being two unknown nobodies just entering the jianghu to rising stars whose names rang out in all directions. Even Lin Yuancheng—who had taken first place at the Assembly and shone so brilliantly in the fight against Gu Qiying—now couldn't match their standing. But truth be told... they weren't very happy right now. The famous spiritual mentor Mr. Ben Parker once said—"With great power comes great responsibility." That is: the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. It was precisely because of their active showing during this Youth Heroes Assembly that Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai had a heap of trouble dumped on them afterward. First came the matter of tying up loose ends with the "Bliss Gu." That was fairly easy to handle. On the fifth day after the great battle—the twenty-first of the eighth month—those who had been afflicted by the gu and had remained in Luoyang gathered together once more and listened to Huang Donglai shake the gu bell a single time. The result... the Bliss Gu did not flare up again, which confirmed that the cure Huang Donglai had given them was correct. Those great heroes of the jianghu were overjoyed on the spot. One of them, a deputy leader of a small sect, ran up on purpose, gripped Huang Donglai's hands with tears streaming down, and said, "Five days... five days! Do you know how I got through these five days?! Do you?!" Clearly, that cure for the gu was nothing pleasant... But that was only to be expected. When you fall ill and take medicine, even the medicine is bitter; when you're poisoned by gu and must cure it, don't you have to swallow a little hardship? So Brother Huang answered the man with a famous line of Alarak, Highlord of the Tal'darim: "Comfort is for coddling children. Only pain and torment are the true meaning of life." When that senior heard this, he was stunned on the spot and nearly blurted out "Brother Huang" to the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old young man before him. Luckily, plenty of big shots from other sects were watching nearby, and in the end he held himself back. In short, once the gu matter was settled, the next thing was the business of "accounting" to the authorities. Though in this universe the authorities' attitude toward the jianghu was basically "jianghu matters are settled within the jianghu," it was just as Shui Hanyi had put it earlier—if they choose not to interfere, they won't; but if they choose to interfere, then anything at all can be interfered with. Setting everything else aside, take Sun Yixie setting fire to the Tianqi Gang's headquarters—whether that counts as a "jianghu matter" is debatable. You could say it is; but if you want to split hairs over the details, what if the fire hadn't been brought under control in time and had spread to the common folk nearby? And had the worst come to pass... it wouldn't have been impossible for the flames to scorch half the city. By Da Ming law: any private person who performs rites to Heaven and worships the Dipper and thereby causes a fire shall receive eighty strokes of the rod; and anyone who deliberately sets fires and burns the dwellings of officials or commoners, government offices, storehouses, or goods held in official stockpiles, shall be beheaded. What did that mean? It meant that if you accidentally started a fire at home while burning incense and worshipping Buddha, you'd still take eighty strokes; and if you set a fire on purpose, that was absolutely a crime to lose your head over. So what Sun Yixie had done on the night of the sixteenth of the eighth month—if the authorities truly meant to pursue it, he'd be in real trouble. And whether they pursued it or not... came down, in the end, to a single word from Shui Hanyi and Yun Shili. Privately, Yun Shili and Shui Hanyi bore no grudge against Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai; not only was there no grudge, they rather admired and respected these two youngsters. That was only natural, too... a pair of crafty seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds like these—the jianghu might not turn out even one such pair in several hundred years. But officially, that was another matter entirely. People of the court naturally had to think and act from the court's standpoint. For men like Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai, if they could be won over, they certainly had to be; and if they couldn't be won over, it was best not to fall out with them either—one should cleverly "cooperate" with them. And so, on the evening of the seventeenth of the eighth month, in the rear hall of the yamen, Shui Hanyi and Yun Shili—who had driven out the county magistrate and made his office their own—invited the two, Sun and Huang, and launched into a tense and thrilling negotiation. The two officials first probed Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai subtly with offers of rank, fame, wealth, and glory, only to find that although these two fellows seemed greedy for money, they weren't actually the sort who would sell their integrity at the drop of a hat. As the talk wore on, the two of them began spouting strange gibberish that no one else could follow, like "too small" and the like. Yun Shili mulled over their expressions and the context and felt it seemed to hint that it was "not enough"; but to be fair, the terms he'd offered were already wildly generous—any higher, and it would be a price only the emperor himself or the most notorious embezzler at court could offer, a level of treatment he himself didn't even enjoy. There was no help for it. Since these two had no sense of restraint when it came to "asking for more money," the two officials had no choice but to move on and talk ideals with them. However, after about an hour of talk, when they came to their senses... the substance of the conversation had somehow become Huang Donglai and Sun Yixie lecturing Yun Shili and Shui Hanyi about ideals. At this point, the "favor" side of their carrot-and-stick approach clearly could go no further. Left with no alternative, Yun Shili and Shui Hanyi could only put on their official airs and switch to a policy of intimidation. So they began making an issue of Sun Yixie's arson. But was Brother Sun the kind of man to plead guilty easily? "Huh? Arson? What arson?" "Don't go making things up. I didn't set any fire. You say I set it—who saw me?" "Heard it from someone else? Who? Words alone prove nothing. Have him produce some evidence." Such slick, practiced denials came rolling off Sun Yixie's tongue without effort. Even for a matter as plain as day, he could deny it with flair and color, leaving Shui Hanyi and Yun Shili lost in admiration. But in the end... this was not something he could deny away. To make a long story short, when Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai came out of the yamen's rear hall that night, they and the officials represented by Yun Shili and Shui Hanyi had reached the following agreements: First, Gu Qiying's notebook on raising gu had to be handed over to the court for safekeeping. This wicked thing, were it to slip into the jianghu, would leave endless trouble in its wake and could not be left unchecked; though... it wasn't that there was no risk in the thing falling into the court's hands either—but relatively speaking, it was surely safer than leaving it in Huang Donglai's hands. Second, all the properties and businesses of the Justice Sect—including, of course, the clearing and rebuilding of their headquarters—would be taken over by the Brocade Guard. Those jianghu sects that had hoped to carve up the spoils while the Justice Sect was going under could drop that idea now... and spare yourselves a fresh round of conflict when you come to fight over the remains. This arrangement originally had nothing to do with Sun and Huang, but the authorities wanted Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai to be the ones to relay it to those martial folk; after all, the two of them had just saved the lives of those comrades, so if they were the ones to handle the talking, even those with grievances would find it hard to voice them. And third, they had to make a trip to Wuchang. As for why they had to go... it had to do with "Youying." It's a long story, and we'll leave it aside for now. And in return for these "obligations," they would naturally receive certain "rights" and other benefits. Shui Hanyi and Yun Shili promised that, from this day on, so long as it was on the soil of Da Ming, wherever Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai went, the authorities would grant them "carte blanche"—that is to say, for their various law-breaking and rule-breaking acts, whether "jianghu matters" or "ordinary matters," the yamen would turn a blind eye; and if they ever needed to borrow the power of the authorities, the local government would do its utmost to smooth the way for them. Originally... that would have been the end of it. But because Sun and Huang were so remarkably skilled at haggling without a shred of shame, as they chatted on they proposed that the authorities "reward" them with a few hundred taels of gold as a token gesture, saying things like, "An outstanding, righteous citizen who foils the plot of a terrorist organization deserves a reward of this size." Shui Hanyi thought to himself: the two of you stir up such a mess and burn down more than half of the Justice Sect's establishment, and I haven't even settled the account for the losses with you yet—and now you have the gall to brazenly extort a few hundred taels of gold out of us? Do you take me for a fool? But in the end they truly couldn't hold out against these two wearing them down with endless wheedling. He and Yun Shili put their heads together and figured, forget it... the local officials of Luoyang had all pocketed plenty from Shen Youran over the years, so why not just make them bleed a little and foot the bill; after all, these days, what official's household can't scrape together a little dirty silver? Raising the money took another few days, but since Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai were going to stay in Luoyang for five days anyway to wait for the gu-afflicted to finish their cure, there was no hurry. All told, what with one thing and another, the two of them stayed in Luoyang seven days more. After seven days, once they'd packed up their luggage and readied the carriage and horses, they finally left Luoyang together with Lei Buji. This Lei Buji had a strong playful streak. He'd originally promised his father he'd go home after visiting the Youth Heroes Assembly, but after all he'd been through, his thinking had changed—especially after losing to Chun Kong in the quarterfinal match of the martial exam, and after witnessing Lin Yuancheng's skill in the finals and during the hunt to surround Gu Qiying, he had come to grasp deeply what it meant that there is a heaven beyond the heavens, and men beyond men... Lei Buji felt that if he kept holed up in that mountain backwater, he'd probably forever be just a fool living in his father's shadow. So he wrote a letter home saying he wanted to roam the jianghu a while longer, to broaden his horizons and gain more seasoning, and that he'd come home once he'd made a name for himself. For fear his father would worry, he made a point of mentioning in the letter that he'd taken two "big brothers," and stressed that Brother Sun and Brother Huang were both heroes whose righteousness reached the heavens, with the courage of a sword and the heart of a lute—that with them leading the way, he certainly wouldn't come to any harm. What his father thought when he read that letter... you can well imagine, dear readers. But that's a matter for later. There's also one more thing that must be mentioned: the injuries of the "Silver Way" Bai Ruhong. Though on the day after the incident everyone had brought the finest physicians in Luoyang to treat him, with a wound as strange as that, ordinary physicians had a hard time making any sense of it. In the end, it was the young monk Chun Kong, out of a compassionate heart, who—seeing that monks and Taoists are all folk who have left the world—took the responsibility upon himself of his own accord and brought Bai Ruhong back to Shaolin Temple, hoping to ask the eminent monks there to join in finding a way to save him. It was a sensible proposal. Shaolin Temple was very close to Luoyang, only half a day's journey, and given Bai Ruhong's condition, long-distance travel wasn't suitable for him; getting him as far as Shaolin was already good enough. Moreover, Shaolin, after all, had deep foundations and stood in the highest esteem; even if no one within its own walls could save Bai Ruhong, perhaps they would know someone in the jianghu who could. And falling back one more step... at least there was no need to worry that Bai Ruhong would come to any harm in the hands of these monks. Having accounted for these side matters, let's return to Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai. Wuchang wasn't too far from Luoyang either—at least it was much closer than Hangzhou or Shu. And their first stop after leaving Luoyang was still to return to Xuzhou. With a carriage, and with Lei Buji as their free driver, they naturally took the official road. After all, the official road was both smooth and safe. But was it truly absolutely safe? Just think back to the scene where Shen Youran's carriage was ambushed by the Water Transport Gang outside Hangzhou, and I'm sure you all have your answer... Right now, in broad daylight, under the wide and bright heavens, the carriage carrying Sun and Huang was actually brought to a halt by someone. The one blocking the road wore a bamboo hat on his head and a long sword at his waist; his figure was upright, lean, sharp, and lithe. He simply planted himself there in the middle of the road, and without even needing to speak, by the killing intent he made no attempt to hide, anyone who laid eyes on him could tell the fellow was not to be trifled with. Lei Buji spotted him from far off, and without waiting for the carriage to draw near, he'd already reined in the horse and slowed. It wasn't that he was afraid; it was mainly that the horse was expensive and the carriage was expensive, and both were brand new. Lei Buji was a boy from a poor family and couldn't bear to see good things ruined. Though the horse and carriage hadn't been bought with his money, if the property his big brothers had shaken down from the yamen got damaged, he'd feel the sting of it too. "Friend, blocking the road for no reason—what's your business?" Having stopped the carriage, Lei Buji didn't get down from the driver's seat; instead he called out loudly to the man from a distance. "None of your concern." The man in the bamboo hat kept his face hidden, but his voice sounded rather young. "I'm looking for the people in the carriage." "Hah?" At those very words, Lei Buji's temper began to rise. "How is it none of my concern? The two in the carriage are my big brothers. What business do you have with them? Did you ask me first?" At that moment, Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai, sitting inside the carriage, were nearly struck dumb. They thought: this Lei Buji is way too guileless—the man hadn't even probed you, and you just went and blurted out the intel about how many people are in the carriage? As it turned out, the man in the bamboo hat wasn't so sharp himself. He raised his head slightly and shot a glance up from under the brim, sizing Lei Buji up, and thought: "What's going on? I heard Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai are both seventeen or eighteen. Why is this dark-faced fellow who looks over thirty and is built like the fierce Zhang Fei calling them 'big brothers'? Could I have stopped the wrong carriage?" Just as he was hesitating, Lei Buji had grown a bit impatient and urged again: "Hey! You there—if you've got business, state it; if not, get out of the road." "Hmph..." At that, the man in the bamboo hat was plainly displeased too. He gave an immediate cold laugh and said, "A mere driver's lackey, daring to talk to me like this. It seems I'll have to teach you a lesson on your two big brothers' behalf..." As his words fell, his figure shifted, and the long sword at his waist had already left its sheath.