The Reverse High-Speed Rail

The night he learned of the family's secret treasures, Sun Yixie told Huang Donglai everything—including all the "closely guarded secrets" he himself had only just learned. Huang Donglai could not help sighing that Brother Sun was simply born lucky: no sooner did he wish for a wondrous encounter than one arrived. At the same time, the two old hands quickly realized something too... If Shen Youran really did harbor designs on the Sun family, then those designs must be aimed at these three treasures. By that point, in their imaginations, they had already cast Shen Youran as a thoroughgoing villain and were one hundred and twenty percent on guard against him. Across the whole martial world, among all the young people setting out for the Youth Heroes Assembly, only these two were wary of the hosts from the very start... Their only grounds were their own dark habit of judging every man's heart by their own petty measure, and they had no idea that Shen Youran's true ambition reached far beyond coveting one family's treasures... But you have to admit, they had guessed right. ………… In the days that followed, Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai both shut themselves in and devoted themselves to martial training, hoping to make what preparations they could for the coming Youth Heroes Assembly in the less than two months that remained. Needless to say, Huang Donglai already had a solid foundation in martial arts; training had always been part of his daily routine. But for Sun Yixie to apply himself seriously to martial arts was truly rare. For the first seven days, Sun Yixie went to the secret chamber every day. Following his father's instructions, he opened the stone coffin, carried out the first stone slab, and—guided by what was written on it (his father had already translated all the characters for him, and with his grounding in Simplified characters he could recognize them all)—sat in meditation and regulated his breathing. When he finished training, he would put the slab back where it belonged and close the coffin again. This training procedure had been handed down by the ancestors as well, because hauling the slabs in and out every day was itself a form of exercise; as one's martial arts improved, the number of slabs one had to move each day would increase, and all of this had been calculated in advance. But once the seven days were up, Sun Yixie found a way to slack off—he secretly copied out the contents of the first slab in Simplified characters, and from the eighth day on he stopped going to the secret chamber and trained in his own room instead. Master Sun assumed his son had memorized the slab's contents over those seven days, so he never grew suspicious. And so it went until the fifteenth day, when Sun Yixie felt it very strange that after two full weeks of training he was still not "invincible." He brought his hand-copied Simplified-character version of the family's supreme art to Huang Donglai and asked whether he was practicing it the wrong way. Huang Donglai studied it and found that this "Reversing Heaven and Earth" was indeed a remarkably advanced internal-energy art. The method of circulating qi recorded in it was, compared with most of the orthodox internal-energy cultivation methods he knew, completely opposite in its logic. In other words, someone like Huang Donglai, who already had a foundation in internal energy, could not practice it even if he got his hands on it; forcing it would only send his meridians surging backward and cause qi deviation. Only someone like Sun Yixie, who knew no martial arts at all, could train it from zero. Of course, the reason Brother Sun had shown no progress after fifteen days was not that he had done anything wrong; it was simply that his level of attainment truly was not there yet. No matter how superior the internal-energy method, it could not open a person's meridians and build internal force in a mere dozen days. Only because Sun Yixie understood nothing at all could he ask such a question. Huang Donglai, exasperated, could only explain the basic concepts of the various martial arts to him once more and tell him to keep training hard—though he had no idea how much of it Sun Yixie actually took in. ………… So the days passed, one after another. Before anyone noticed, it was late summer turning to early autumn. Over those fifty days, Sun Yixie naturally had not finished mastering "Reversing Heaven and Earth," but being in a hurry, on the twenty-fifth day he secretly brought Huang Donglai into the chamber and had him copy out the contents of the twenty-odd slabs, all in Simplified characters. After that, Sun Yixie practiced the foundational internal energy on the one hand while skipping ahead to look at the various techniques that came later. With the day of departure for Luoyang approaching, Sun Yixie simply bound all the pages Huang Donglai had copied for him into one volume—a homemade "secret manual" he planned to carry with him. After all, no one in this world but he and Huang Donglai could read the stuff, and the paper and ink were still new; even if an outsider picked it up, no one would ever imagine it was some peerless martial art from ages past. So he wasn't afraid of losing it. As for Huang Donglai, during these days, while instructing Brother Sun in the fundamentals of the martial arts, he had in effect reviewed all those fundamentals himself. And he had to admit... it worked. His martial cultivation was now further advanced than when he had first come to Hangzhou; he had broken through a bottleneck. Also, the letter he had sent home to the Huang Clan through the Flying Pigeon Gang had received a reply. The head of the Huang Clan had included the invitation to the Youth Heroes Assembly that the Justice Sect had sent to Shu, and in the letter he instructed Huang Donglai to look after his martial nephew from the Sun family and to win some honor for the Huang Clan at the assembly. And so the two of them were, more or less, fully prepared, and were to set out that day. Little did they expect... on the day of departure, something unexpected happened again—Huang Donglai never would have imagined that Sun Yixie had bought the wrong ticket to Luoyang. Here a brief introduction to transportation and communications in the Da Ming is in order. First, communications and logistics generally went through official channels—the so-called "postal relay system." In the Da Ming, any county town of even modest size had a post station, covering essentially the whole country. Common folk who wanted to send letters or goods could drop them off at a post station. Of course, there were limits on the weight and size of parcels; if you wanted to haul a whole cartload of goods, you had better figure it out yourself. The government had no spare capacity to allot to you, and even if it did, the price quoted would be far higher than hiring your own cart and men. The "Flying Pigeon Gang" mentioned earlier was a means of communication available only to jianghu folk and the wealthy and powerful; they would not do business with ordinary commoners at all. Now for transportation. Whether you drove a carriage, rode a horse, or went on foot, the official roads were naturally the safest choice; they were wide, in relatively good condition, and every few dozen li along the way there was a post station. Post stations came in two kinds—"official post stations," which served only government officials, and "civilian post stations," which were open to ordinary people. Either way, they were run by the authorities, so traveling the official roads meant putting money in the government's purse—unless you could cover several hundred li a day and reach a town every night to stay at an inn, or were willing to sleep out in the street. Besides traveling on your own, there was another option: taking a passenger coach run by the "High-Speed Rail Gang." This so-called High-Speed Rail Gang was nominally a jianghu gang, but everyone knew the government ran it from behind the scenes. Every gang leader they had ever had was surnamed Gao and named Tie. It was less a name than a title bound to the position. The gang never involved itself in the feuds of the martial world, so hardly anyone knew what this Gang Leader Gao looked like—and knowing would have been meaningless anyway... because this was a man who could be swapped out at any time. The High-Speed Rail Gang's only business was "passenger transport." They assigned drivers and vehicles of various sizes to ferry travelers to and fro across the land. Whether you were a jianghu figure, an ordinary commoner, or an official's son with too much time on his hands looking to sample life, so long as you bought a "ticket," you could ride in their coaches. For many people setting out to seek out relatives or to seek out a sect and take a master, buying a horse or hiring a carriage was expensive and a hassle, while walking was too slow—and the longer you spent on the road, the more travel money you burned. So the High-Speed Rail Gang's passenger coaches were an excellent choice. This time, Huang Donglai and Sun Yixie had originally planned to buy "High-Speed Rail tickets" and go straight to Luoyang, to make the journey easier on themselves: from one post station to the next, they wouldn't have to find their own way, nor periodically hire new drivers and spend money changing horses (on such a long journey, a hired driver would generally not follow his employer across several provinces, and the same horse could not pull a carriage at the same speed day after day over such a distance, so such trips usually required changing drivers and horses several times, haggling with the local horse traders each time). By traveling with the High-Speed Rail Gang's coaches, none of these petty annoyances would trouble them. As a Hangzhou native, Sun Yixie was naturally the one to buy the tickets. It worked out nicely: having trained at home every day lately, Sun Yixie was itching to get out and clear his head, so three days before their departure he took half a day to go to the local High-Speed Rail Gang branch and buy the tickets. When he came back, he told Huang Donglai, "All taken care of! You can relax!" Huang Donglai didn't think much of it at the time; how could buying a ticket possibly go wrong? And so today, the day of their departure, something did go wrong. The two of them each slung a bundle over their backs—Sun Yixie also carrying a trident—and arrived at the departure point in high spirits. Then Sun Yixie showed the ticket, and he was told: "You bought it backwards. This is a ticket from Luoyang to Hangzhou." Sun Yixie was immediately annoyed. "Damn it, what's the difference between Luoyang-to-Hangzhou and Hangzhou-to-Luoyang? The price ought to be the same, right? Just let us get on and be done with it." The High-Speed Rail Gang fellow receiving them was amused. "Then there's no difference between walking from your home to here and from here back to your home. How about you just go back?" Stung, Sun Yixie snatched up his trident and struck a pose as though about to skewer the man. "Motherf—! What kind of attitude is that? And why didn't you people warn me when I bought the ticket? Didn't the person who sold it to me ever wonder why, when I'm in Hangzhou, I'd be buying a ticket from Luoyang to Hangzhou?" "Let me think... Say you have a friend living in Luoyang and you want to invite him to Hangzhou for a visit. So you buy a ticket, tuck it into a letter, and mail it to him. That's reasonable, isn't it?" the High-Speed Rail Gang man replied. "Uh..." Sun Yixie was speechless. "Besides, young fellow, you're a big strapping man, full grown." The man was not letting it go, and went on with a grin. "If a little kid came to buy a ticket and this happened, our ticket seller might say a word of warning. But when someone like you comes to buy one, of course we assume you've thought it through." "I—" Sun Yixie wanted to use this as an excuse to blow up, but the man's reasoning was too sound, and a crowd of people waiting for their coaches had gathered to watch him, which made it all the harder for him to back down gracefully. "All right, all right... Brother Sun, that's enough, do it for my sake." In the end it was Huang Donglai who stepped forward and gave Brother Sun a way out, preventing him from humiliating himself any further. Unfortunately, although Huang Donglai afterward negotiated politely with the High-Speed Rail Gang people, the seats really were all sold out, and they could not get on. The next coach to Luoyang would not leave until seven days later, and setting out then might mean missing the assembly at the Mid-Autumn Festival. With no choice, the two bought tickets on the spot and boarded a coach bound for Xuancheng, thinking they would figure something out once they got there. Along the way, Huang Donglai naturally could not resist mocking Sun Yixie for his "reverse high-speed rail" feat, while Sun Yixie kept stubbornly arguing and dumping the blame on the High-Speed Rail Gang. The other passengers put up with their racket in silence, not daring to tell them to shut up. After all, one of the pair was carrying something that looked like an oversized pitchfork, and he seemed rather volatile; if they angered him and got skewered, how unlucky that would be. Thus the carriage rolled on. Around noon it paused briefly at a post station, then was soon on its way again. By the hour of Wei, as the coach was traveling along the road, suddenly... "Ohh, Brother Sun, my stomach's suddenly killing me, what do I do?" Huang Donglai had had a weak stomach since childhood and often had to move his bowels three or more times a day. He felt it coming on again. "What am I supposed to do about it?" Sun Yixie grumbled with disgust, but he still turned and moved up to the front of the coach to speak with the driver. A moment later he came back. "The driver says the schedule is all fixed and he can't stop whenever he likes, or they won't make it into town before dark and the whole lot of us will be locked outside the city gate. He can't take that responsibility." "How long until the next post station, then?" Huang Donglai asked. "A good while yet," Sun Yixie said. "He says if you really can't hold it, jump off, take care of it quick in the woods by the road, and then find your own way to catch up." Huang Donglai really was desperate. He thought it over. "Fine... my lightness skill's not bad, I should be able to catch up. But Brother Sun, can you manage?" "Huh?" Sun Yixie was stunned. "What's it got to do with me? Why would I go with you?" "To keep watch for me," Huang Donglai said. "What if I'm caught with my pants down and some highwaymen sneak up and cut me down?" "Then go die!" Sun Yixie's voice went shrill as he said it. This sort of exchange—the kind middle schoolers... no, elementary schoolers had when inviting each other to the toilet—sounded perfectly natural coming from them. "Damn it! Are we brothers or not? One word!" Huang Donglai urged. "Hurry, I can't hold it much longer." "Fine, fine, fine." Sun Yixie saw that quite a few of the passengers were looking at them and stifling laughter, and he felt that staying here alone would be humiliating too, so he grabbed up the trident lying across the floor and rose to his feet. "I'll go with you, I'll go with you..." The High-Speed Rail Gang's carriage was built specifically for passengers: long, wide-bodied, and drawn by four horses. Its speed was not great—by modern reckoning, about twenty kilometers an hour—so getting off even while it was moving was no great feat. Soon Huang and Sun leaped down from the coach one after the other. The instant his feet hit the ground, Huang Donglai was off like a shot, making straight for the woods by the road, unfastening his trousers as he ran. Sun Yixie watched his receding back and laughed uproariously, then shouldered his trident and strolled after him. Seeing Brother Huang in such a sorry state, he suddenly felt his earlier humiliation ease a great deal. Keep watch he supposedly did, but Sun Yixie did not stand very close—first, because there was no need, and second, because even several zhang away, his imagination convinced him he could smell the stench. Just as he was waiting for Huang Donglai to finish, a figure suddenly stumbled out of the woods on the other side of the road and fell flat on the ground with a thud. Perhaps because she had run herself completely out of strength, she did not even let out a groan after falling; she simply lay prone, fighting for breath. Sun Yixie looked closely and saw it was a woman, around twenty years old, dressed like a village girl. She could not be called a great beauty, but she was not bad-looking either. Just as Sun Yixie was hesitating over whether to go help her up, two more figures came bursting out of the woods behind the village girl. This time... it was two men in blue tunics and black trousers, each with a steel saber in hand. "Hah... let's see you run now!" Seeing the village girl fallen on the ground, one of them immediately bared his teeth in a savage grin. He strode forward in a couple of long steps and reached out to grab the woman by the hair. "Hold it!" By then Sun Yixie had already crossed the road from the other side and come charging over. With his trident in hand, standing tall and letting out an angry shout, he actually cut a rather imposing figure. "In broad daylight, under the clear sky, what do you think you're doing to a defenseless woman?" Sun Yixie deliberately raised his voice very loud, mainly so that Huang Donglai would hear him from afar. Even if Huang Donglai didn't hear, then if any passersby heard, he would have that much more confidence. "Hm?" The two men with sabers were just ordinary underlings, and being shouted at like that by Sun Yixie, they actually felt a bit unnerved. They looked up and saw a young man of seventeen or eighteen with four eyebrows, holding a peculiar weapon. Their first reaction was... this kid was no ordinary sort. Anyone with a bit of jianghu experience knew that a man who wielded a relatively rare, unorthodox weapon could hardly be a poor fighter. It was like learning basketball, where everyone starts with the most basic dribbling and passing. Weapon students generally began with the common arms—saber, spear, staff, club—and only once the foundation was laid could they switch to training the specialized weapons. "Kid, I'd advise you not to stick your nose in where it doesn't belong." After a brief standoff, one of the underlings delivered a stock line worthy of his station: "We're from Zouma Stronghold. You probably can't afford to cross us." "Zouma Stronghold?" Sun Yixie repeated the three characters he was hearing for the first time, and sneered. "Hah... bandits, is it?" By now he had read a trace of nervousness in the other two's faces, so he went right along with his bluff. "Is there anyone around Hangzhou that I, Sun Yixie, can't afford to cross?" he boasted shamelessly. "Talk! Who heads your stronghold? How many men have you got? Where do you operate? Say it all and let me hear it. Oppose me? You all die!"