“There is no banquet under Heaven that does not eventually end; you will get used to it.”

After such a harsh winter, when the Qiongjiang trees finally grew new tender shoots, Chang An finally cut down the first branch of his life.

He could finally taste the sweet-tasting liquid inside that thing. Chang An thought that it must be much sweeter and more fragrant than the candy that Bei Shi casually tossed to him.

Bei Shi saw the long-awaited scene: the child crouched on the ground like a little animal, holding the branch in both hands. Without caring that he was covered in dirt from head to toe, he first cautiously smelled it, then, like a greedy little glutton, went “Awoo!” and took a huge bite. His face immediately went from white to red, then from red to green, and finally he spat it out with a “Pfft!”, choking and coughing violently.

Bei Shi finally saw the scene he had been looking forward to and could not help bursting into loud laughter.

Chang An turned around with tears in his eyes and looked at him in grief and indignation—he finally understood that Bei Shi, that great bastard, had tricked him. The liquid flowing from this damned tree was not some delicious sugary water at all; it was clearly spicy and pungent!

“Little brat, you’re wasting a perfectly good thing without knowing its value.” As he said this, Bei Shi walked beneath a Qiongjiang tree. His slender hand suddenly transformed into a beast claw, easily piercing through the tree’s patterns and removing a branch. He tipped his head back and drank it all in one go, then let out a long, satisfied breath. “Natural Qiongjiang, incomparably superior to that stuff those fools brew from rice. Its fragrance can be passed down for a hundred generations; one cup can make a person forget their worries, two cups make them carefree, and after three cups and five bowls, one can become drunk for a thousand autumns and ten thousand years. Even that True God who, according to legend, fell long ago—did he ever have such a carefree time?”

As Bei Shi spoke, he lowered his eyes and glanced sideways at Chang An. Something different seemed to flash across that face of ever-changing moods that Chang An had long since grown accustomed to. Chang An looked up at his trickster of a teacher without understanding anything at all, completely failing to grasp what he meant.

He seemed to be saying that the tree sap was something good, yet his tone sounded nothing like that.

Chang An frowned and thought for a long while. Finally, he decided to let facts speak for themselves. He would personally taste what exactly this thing was.

This time, he was more careful. He only tasted a tiny mouthful, holding it in his mouth for a while in an attempt to discern some other flavour beneath the choking spiciness. Yet after tasting it with a deeply troubled expression for quite some time, he finally wrinkled his little face and swallowed it with difficulty. The spiciness travelled all the way from his throat to his stomach, and he felt as though his entire body were on fire.

The straight trees swayed back and forth before his eyes without stopping. Before Chang An could understand what was happening, he staggered several crab-like steps and then collapsed head first, becoming dead drunk and completely unconscious.

From that day onward, Chang An understood one thing—Bei Shi was a big oddball.

Gradually, Chang An grew used to life on the mountain. He became accustomed to living exposed to the elements on the rooftop, and to his body becoming so seriously ill that he would feel unable to breathe and even seem close to death. He had figured out the pattern: whenever his back and arms began to grow strangely numb, he would immediately put down his knife, pour himself a bowl of medicinal herbs, drink it, then return to the rooftop and lie down for a while. Once the numbness disappeared, he would resume practising.

During that time, he could seize the opportunity to sleep for a while, so that he could get up again at night and continue practising his knife without delaying his training.

At first, Bei Shi would examine his body every few days and find new medicinal herbs for him to drink. But the new herbs did not always work. After Chang An once drank one of Bei Shi’s new concoctions and suffered from diarrhea for three days, he refused to trust the man ever again.

Chang An finally understood why Bei Shi lived alone on the mountain—he must have killed someone while practising medicine as a half-baked doctor down below, and had no choice but to flee up the mountain to hide from the victim’s family.

He stated this extremely disrespectful conjecture to his master without the slightest hesitation. As a result, Bei Shi chased him around the Qiongjiang grove with a stick for an entire afternoon.

By the autumn of that year, when the malt wheat began to be harvested, Chang An finally had his own little wooden house. The fourth knife he had been given also developed a rolled edge—Chang An naturally concluded that this was because Bei Shi’s skill at forging knives was inadequate.

He also drank up all the medicinal herbs Bei Shi had stored throughout the spring. Bei Shi had never expected that the little brat he had picked up would be such a wasteful child, and he regretted it bitterly.

However, no matter what, Chang An could now wield a large knife more than two chi long.

In the third year, the knife in Chang An’s hands grew another chi longer, growing much faster than he did. Bei Shi finally let him out of the little grove, allowing him to run wild and cause havoc throughout the entirety of Yufeng Mountain.

At first, Bei Shi would accompany him. After Chang An killed a Bone-Winged Great Peng by himself, Bei Shi stopped appearing when he went hunting. Hunting became part of Chang An’s daily routine: he could both supplement his meals with meat and practice his knife.

Later, when Chang An looked back on the days of his childhood when he had learned the knife, he realized that throughout the entire process of his training, the words that had accompanied him most often seemed to have been simply “eating and drinking.”

Legend had it that when young eagles learned to fly, the old eagles would harden their hearts and push them off cliffs. But Chang An never waited for the old eagle to give him the order. While the old eagle was still sleeping, he would always take it upon himself to jump down head first, and, completely without a care in the world, would consider himself extremely free and happy.

Bei Shi’s medicinal herbs still could neither save a life nor cure an illness. Chang An had grown to fourteen or fifteen, beginning to look like a young man. His features gradually matured, and although he still lacked much colour in his complexion, he slowly acquired a handsome face so finely sculpted that it made people think of the words “meticulously carved.”

In Bei Shi’s opinion, whenever Chang An sat there without speaking or moving, he looked exactly like a delicate flower gazing at its reflection beside the water.

This delicate flower lay quietly in ambush for a long time. Suddenly, his gaze flashed, and his entire body shot upright. He drew a great sabre nearly twice his own height. That cumbersome, massive weapon did not appear heavy in his hands in the slightest.

At the same time, a huge shadow rose from the water. It was a blue double-headed snake. It opened its bloody maw as though blotting out the sky and covering the earth, and bit down toward this little thing who, overestimating itself, dared to challenge it.

Chang An calmly stepped backward. In a flash, his knife passed with extreme precision through the tiny gap beneath the giant snake’s fangs. The blade went straight through the snake’s mouth. The giant snake raised its head in pain, while Chang An stepped onto its body with his toe and used the long handle of the great sabre to flip himself into the air. Borrowing the momentum of this leap, the great sabre mercilessly pierced through one of the snake’s heads.

Under the intense pain, the other snake head became even more furious and slammed violently toward him. Chang An leaped onto the sabre handle, which was embedded in the snake’s head, and climbed up along the black-iron shaft with greater agility than a monkey.

The giant snake missed him entirely and turned around to bite toward the sabre handle.

Chang An jumped downward, both hands gripping the sabre handle. Using the force of pressing down from above, the blade of the great sabre, lodged in the snake’s head, tore through its skin and bones, scattering its foul-smelling flesh and blood everywhere and dyeing the water of the little river red. At that moment, the great sabre in Chang An’s hands strangely changed direction in mid-air and, unstoppable, smashed down toward the other snake head.

There were two sounds of something falling into the water: one was Chang An, and the other was the snake head that had been cleanly severed.

A moment later, the “delicate flower” swam up from the water, carrying his great sabre on his back. Behind him remained the corpse of a double-headed snake, along with two ruined heads. He casually squeezed the water from his clothes and, barefoot and dripping wet, passed through a patch of forest as though he knew the way by heart, running to Bei Shi’s little courtyard halfway up the mountain. He called out, “Master, I cut down a snake.”

Bei Shi was sharpening a knife. At this, he did not even raise his head, remaining focused on examining the blade as he casually said, “What’s so unusual about you cutting down a snake?”

Chang An thought about it and realized there was indeed nothing unusual about it, so he said, “I can’t drag it back. Master, you pick it up and bring it home. Shall we make snake soup?”

Hearing this, Bei Shi followed him out of the house, intending to go see this snake that the little wolf cub could not drag back. As a result, he saw by the river a double-headed snake that, when coiled up, was larger than the little wooden house where the brat lived.

Bei Shi stared blankly upward at this enormous creature for a long while. Then he turned around and looked at the ferocious “delicate flower” he had personally raised. At last, he let out a long sigh and pressed hard on Chang An’s forehead, scolding, “You’re nothing but beastly instinct.”

Chang An blinked blankly, not understanding.

“You look perfectly human and respectable, so why don’t you have the slightest trace of humanity?” Bei Shi sighed as he dismantled the double-headed snake’s corpse into pieces. He transformed into a giant beast, dragged the snake meat on his body, and carried it home. He was not afraid that the smell of blood would attract other beasts. There truly were not many things in this world bold enough to covet a double-headed snake… with the exception of that audacious little wolf cub.

Bei Shi reflected upon himself—how had a perfectly good child, after merely seven or eight years in his hands, grown more and more unreasonable?

Yet after thinking for a long while, Bei Shi genuinely could not figure out what he himself had done wrong. In the end, he attributed everything to “nature”—this boy Chang An, apart from being unable to transform into a beast, was naturally a beast embryo.

Chang An followed him and asked with a completely bewildered expression, “Master, what is ‘humanity’?”

The question left even Bei Shi speechless. He paused, not knowing how to answer—what exactly was “humanity”? Humans knew fear; they knew to bully the weak and fear the strong; they knew how to conceal a dagger behind a smile. Yet that did not make them much more sophisticated than animals. Once they transformed into beasts, they became no different from ordinary livestock. What drove them was still nothing more than food and lust.

Thinking about it this way, “humanity”… really did not have much good about it. If anything, humans were even more shameless.

At dusk, Chang An took a large piece of snake meat that he could not finish eating, wrapped it in yellow leaves and grass skins to preserve it, and went down the mountain.

Ever since he had been able to wield the great sabre with its black-iron shaft, Bei Shi had stopped restricting him, letting him go wherever he pleased. From then on, every ten days or half a month, Chang An would go down the mountain and deliver processed animal hides and meat to someone down below. Sometimes, he would also bring along a flower that had bloomed at its most brilliant.

Chang An had come up the mountain when he was only seven or eight years old, and another seven or eight years had passed. Yet he still remembered the person who had once taken care of him for several short months. Only at times like this did Bei Shi feel that Chang An was a good child. At the very least, he knew to repay kindness, which truly made him far better than most people in the world.

When Chang An reached seventeen, one day, when he returned from the foot of the mountain, he saw Bei Shi sitting alone at the entrance to the courtyard, holding a bowl of wine from the Qiongjiang tree but not drinking it. He had held that bowl for who knew how long; even when a leaf drifted down into it, he did not notice.

Chang An vaguely sensed that something had happened.

Sure enough, Bei Shi looked at the young man he had raised with his own hands, sighed, and said, “Little brat, you’ve been learning the knife from me for ten years. Tomorrow, pack your things and go down the mountain.”

Chang An had not expected Bei Shi to say something like that. Caught completely off guard, he stood there in a daze.

Bei Shi said softly, “On Yufeng Mountain, there are only beasts that know nothing. You’ve even killed a double-headed snake, so there’s nothing left here that can temper you. But in this world, there are plenty of things far more powerful than beasts. You can’t spend your whole life without seeing them…”

Chang An crouched down and suddenly interrupted him by asking, “Master, has something happened to you?”

Bei Shi raised his hand and stroked his head. Chang An was not stupid—in fact, he was extremely intelligent. He had simply lived with Bei Shi on this desolate mountain for so many years that he had never learned how to conduct himself as a person.

After a pause, Bei Shi said frankly, “I’m leaving too. If fate allows, you’ll see me again in the future. If…”

His voice abruptly stopped there.

Bei Shi stood up, glanced at the wine that had been dirtied, and casually poured it out at the entrance to the courtyard. Once again, he twisted his disciple’s hair into the shape of a bird’s nest.

“There is no banquet in this world that does not end; you’ll get used to it.” He looked at Chang An and suddenly smiled. “I’m actually quite reluctant to part with you, little brat.”

 

End of book 1

 

Translator : DarNan