For a moment, Bei Shi almost thought he was dead.

 

After arguing with Bei Shi, Chang An felt much better, even the tightness in his chest seemed to have eased somewhat.

This was the first time in his life that he had ever argued with someone. As for the little brats in the Vulture Tribe, Chang An had always looked down on them. One by one, they were all noisy and blustering, but went soft as soon as they were hit; there was simply nothing worth arguing with them about.

And his former guardians had all been people like Zhe Yan and A Yan. Zhe Yan could not afford to get angry; whenever he did, he would feel so unwell that he could not sleep for nights on end, and the next day he would cough as though he were about to breathe his last, shaking several times even when the wind blew.

A Yan was even more impossible to talk back to—Chang An had never seen what his own Ama looked like. His only understanding of women was someone like A Yan: her embrace was extraordinarily warm, and even her voice was soft and delicate, so that if one listened to her long enough, one could gradually drift into a hazy sleep. She was so gentle that even when she had nothing to do, she had more than enough room for her own melancholy; whenever she became sad from overthinking things, she would shed tears without stopping. Chang An was always afraid that she would drain all the water from her body that way, so how could he possibly dare provoke her?

Mm... There was also a carpenter, but that one was best left unmentioned.

As for Bei Shi... he looked very sturdy at a glance, strong and robust. Chang An was not worried in the slightest that he might anger him to death.

Chang An knew that Bei Shi was formidable, so formidable that he could not even imagine the extent of his strength. The child had already discovered that all the strange creatures on this entire mountain, creatures he had never even heard of before, would avoid Bei Shi. Yet, out of instinct, Chang An was simply not afraid of him. Instead, he felt a kind of inexplicable trust toward him.

He simply knew that this man would not hurt him.

Chang An had suffered his first setback, but he did not give up.

After catching his breath, he picked up his knife again and once more threw himself into the seemingly endless practice. This time, he reduced the frequency with which he swung his little knife. With every stroke, he pondered and adjusted; not a single stroke was perfunctory. His whole being seemed to have grown onto the knife itself, and nothing around him could disturb him. He had practically reached the point of forgetting both food and sleep.

It was only when it was already very late that Bei Shi came over to take him away, intending to order him to start a fire, that Chang An suddenly let out a muffled groan. As though awakening from a dream, he discovered that all the tender skin between the palms of his two hands had already been rubbed raw by the knife handle.

Chang An did not care about it. He simply grimaced for a while, then, without the slightest concern for appearances, wiped the blood haphazardly over himself as though wiping away mucus from his nose, before bouncing off to start the fire.

The words Bei Shi had been about to ask him—“Does it hurt?”—stuck in the man's throat as he watched Chang An's retreating figure jogging away covered in bloodstains.

The man remained stunned for a long while before finally laughing and saying, “You little beast.”

The little beast studied bitterly and diligently day after day, never stopping even for a moment. Every night, he climbed onto the roof himself to sleep—Bei Shi had said it casually, and he had actually taken him seriously.

Bei Shi's daily life basically consisted of hunting, gathering medicinal herbs, tending to the sprouted wheat he grew in his garden, or forging blades. As for forging blades, it depended on his mood; sometimes he would not touch it for ten days or half a month, while at other times he would work at it for three or five days without rest.

Apart from that, he was actually quite bored. Whenever he had some free time, he would give Chang An some pointers, or squat nearby and deliberately provoke him with a few playful remarks.

At first, Chang An would be teased into looking furious enough to bite someone. But after a long time, he gradually got used to it and slowly developed an extraordinary skill of keeping his emotions from showing on his face.

When it came to swordsmanship, he had always been the sort who understood something as soon as it was pointed out to him. With Bei Shi's guidance, he became even more capable of drawing inferences from one example to understand many others. One day... Unfortunately, he still could not travel a thousand li.

A blade could only be mastered through practice. No matter how much he understood, he still could not capture the patterns on the qiongjiang trees, nor could he produce a blade stroke that fast.

But he was not discouraged.

Chang An knew that what Bei Shi had taught him was an extraordinary skill. The more extraordinary something was, the less likely it was that everyone could master it. Since that was so, it was bound to be extremely, extremely difficult.

Although he was young, he understood this principle: anything unique in all under Heaven must be exchanged for a hardship equally unique in all under Heaven.

Three months passed. Chang An lived a life of sleeping rough and eating whatever he could find, yet he never once mentioned to Bei Shi that he wanted to move indoors.

Unfortunately, the qiongjiang tree still stood there full of vigor, accepting day after day the challenge of this overestimating little cub, while Chang An had already worn the edge of his first little knife completely blunt.

He had become even thinner, practically looking as though he were lovesick—unable to eat or drink, his body growing gaunt and emaciated. Yet his eyes were extraordinarily clear, without the slightest wavering or confusion.

Bei Shi watched coldly from the sidelines, feeling that this little wolf cub hardly resembled a child at all. He was more like an uncompromising ascetic.

The man slowly began to be moved. He remembered something his teacher had once told him: if a person could truly remain undistracted, thinking about only one thing from morning until night and doing only that one thing, then in less than three years, he could achieve a modest level of mastery; in ten years, he could achieve great mastery; and in thirty years... he could become unrivalled beneath Heaven.

Bei Shi had once been unable to understand it. Could someone really spend the entire day thinking about nothing but one thing, apart from eating, drinking, urinating, and defecating?

Now, he had met Chang An.

Six months passed, and winter arrived. White snow came roaring down from the summit of Yufeng Mountain, sweeping across the entire northern continent with overwhelming force.

That day, the sky remained gloomy throughout. By afternoon, great flakes of snow began to fall like goose feathers.

Bei Shi had already prepared all the food needed for winter. He warmed himself a cup of liquor from the qiongjiang tree and sat silently beside the bed, watching Chang An in the backyard.

The wind could not move him, nor could sudden downpours move him. Seeing this, Bei Shi felt that, let alone snow, even if knives rained from the sky, that little beast would probably still stand in the courtyard chopping trees without changing expression.

Chang An held the knife handle firmly in both hands and stared intently at the trunk of the qiongjiang tree. This time, he stood there without moving at all. Holding the one-arm-length little knife, his eyes seemed to contain nothing except that tree.

The snow fell harder and harder, large clumps striking Chang An's body, almost burying the small child beneath them.

Bei Shi was surprised to discover that the length and rhythm of Chang An's breathing were changing according to some kind of pattern. With his eyesight, he could see that the little fellow seemed almost about to merge with the tree; some strange connection had formed between the rapidly flashing patterns of the tree and the child's long, steady breaths.

Bei Shi could not help but stand up.

Just then, he saw the little fellow move. Chang An still knew only one technique—the very move with which he had once killed the eagle wolf. At the instant the blade was sent forward, he turned sideways and slashed horizontally, drawing upon the rotation of his entire body as well as the strength of the earth. Then the blade gave a “buzz” as it split the great mass of snowflakes in midair and struck against the hard bark. Bei Shi's pupils involuntarily contracted.

He saw it clearly: the child had actually caught the patterns of the qiongjiang tree. It was only that before the blade could reach its target, he had already exhausted all his strength and failed to drive the blade in. For the first time, a shallow white mark was clearly left on the bark.

The blade immediately bent and flew out of Chang An's hand, shooting several zhang away. Chang An stumbled forward two steps, swayed, then plunged headfirst to the ground and did not get up again.

Bei Shi hurriedly set down his cup, strode forward, and scooped Chang An up, only to discover that the child's face was deathly blue, even his lips had turned purple. He looked as though he were suffocating. When Bei Shi reached out to feel his chest, he could not feel his heartbeat!

Held in his hands, Chang An unconsciously clutched his chest, desperately trying to curl himself up, but he could not move.

He could see nothing and feel nothing, except for that one spot in his chest. It had gone numb, yet beneath the numbness was an indescribable pain that slowly spread from his chest to his entire front and back.

He began gasping for breath, yet he could not draw in even a single breath.

Bei Shi pressed his chest several times. Seeing that the child showed no reaction, he struck him in the chest with his fist in desperation. Chang An straightened violently like a dying fish, his body becoming rigid as though he were a bow drawn to its full extent.

For a moment, Bei Shi almost thought he was dead.

Yet whether a long time had passed or merely an instant, Chang An suddenly trembled and finally let out a faint breath. He slowly closed his eyes and went limp in Bei Shi's arms. Only then did the palm Bei Shi had pressed against his chest feel the chaotic beating of his heart through his delicate, fragile bones.

Bei Shi was stunned for a moment. He carefully picked Chang An up, took off his outer robe and wrapped him in it, wiped away the damp droplets covering his head—whether cold sweat or melted snow, he could not tell—and carried Chang An into the house.

Only then did he let out a sigh of relief, as though he himself had just gone through a life-and-death ordeal.

That night, Chang An woke up in the middle of the night. Bei Shi knew it. After hearing the child cough twice, he soon heard him get up. So he pretended to be asleep, wanting to see what he intended to do.

Chang An sat at the edge of the bed, clutching his chest for a while—Bei Shi's punch had not been light and had nearly broken his bones; his chest was badly bruised and would probably remain swollen for ten days or half a month. After catching his breath, he silently picked up the pillow that was half as long as his body, dragged along the tattered little blanket sewn from animal hide, and carried everything up onto the roof.

And so he slept in the heavy snow.

Although he usually bickered and argued with Bei Shi and showed very little understanding of respecting one's teacher and honoring the teacher's teachings, he always remembered his promise that “I will not enter the house until I have chopped enough wood to build a shelter,” and followed it through to the very end, without the slightest deviation.

But on such a cold night, how could a little cub with barely any flesh on his bones possibly endure the freezing cold?

Sure enough, before long, the sound of chopping wood came from the forest behind the house. Standing by the window, Bei Shi watched Chang An in the clear, cold light of the snow as the child began practicing his blade with somewhat awkward movements.

It seemed the little cub had come up with a practical yet ingenious way to keep himself warm.

Bei Shi suddenly felt, faintly... that he had no choice but to take this little disciple.

For someone who wielded a blade, the most important talent was neither the intelligence to remember everything at a glance nor a body possessing limitless strength, but the courage to believe oneself capable of cutting through anything, and perseverance beyond what an ordinary person could imagine.

Bei Shi hesitated for a while. In his entire life, he had rarely hesitated even a few times, yet this time he suddenly found himself unable to make up his mind.

The more things a person had seen, the more accurate their judgments tended to become. Yet a person's life was limited; it was impossible to see everything, and impossible to be right every single time.

Bei Shi himself did not know what a child like this would ultimately become.

There was no way for him to judge it. He could not even remember what kind of feelings he himself had held toward the blade when he had been Chang An's age.

The night wind swept across vast stretches of qiongjiang trees, making the leafless branches rustle. Snow continued to fall with soft, rustling sounds.

 

Translator : DarNan