Chapter 579: - The Jianghu (Part II)

Prince of Jingnan himself appeared.

His princely banner appeared with him.

And at that moment, the volunteer force began to collapse.

Yan people disliked Prince of Jingnan.

It was simply dislike.

But if you entered any teahouse or wine shop in Yan and asked:

Who in Great Yan, no, who beneath all Heaven, was best at war?

You would receive essentially one answer.

The Southern Marquis.

And when Yan people said it, there was still pride beneath the words.

Whatever else one might say, the Southern Marquis was our Yan Southern Marquis.

Whatever else one might say, against outsiders, the Southern Marquis had never lost!

That pride mixed into the fear and quietly diluted much of the fear away.

But to the people of Chu?

Set distant matters aside. Prince of Jingnan’s twin cavalry armies had smashed the Jin lands.

More recently, there were the ghosts of forty thousand true Azure Luan Army soldiers beneath Yupan City.

That pain had cut directly into Chu flesh.

Furthermore, setting aside Chu’s wars against the hundred Shanyue tribes, military conflicts among the Chu nobles themselves generally ended with both sides preserving a certain degree of aristocratic dignity.

They lived in a country of “dignity,” an environment of “dignity,” and naturally came to believe the entire world ought to work that way.

A treaty?

He tore it up whenever he pleased.

Captured soldiers?

He killed them whenever he pleased.

Nian Yao, Great Chu’s General-in-Chief of this generation, might have been born a slave, but during the Rebellion of the Princes he had caught rebellious princes as casually as chickens. Chu people respected him for that.

Yet even General-in-Chief Nian could only hide inside fortified positions and passively endure blows when facing that Southern Marquis.

And even that had failed to stop the war from rotting away around him.

Most despairing of all was the Southern Marquis’s personal strength.

In single combat, he had defeated the Sword Saint of Jin.

To accomplish such a thing with the body of a Martial Artist was something the jianghu had not seen in a century.

Even the Blind Man, forever “ambitious,” had once sighed that so long as the Southern Marquis remained alive, their own household could never rebel.

A tree casts a shadow.

A man casts a name.

The people inside Ying Capital knew only that the Yan army had come.

Most of them had no idea that the isolated force which had penetrated this deeply was personally led by Prince of Jingnan, commander-in-chief of Yan’s entire campaign against Chu.

The situation already resembled black clouds pressing down hard enough to crush the city.

Raising Prince of Jingnan’s banner on top of that was the final straw laid upon the camel.

This force, assembled from jianghu men, routed soldiers, and a few young officials who still possessed ambition and courage, already represented one of the last remaining scraps of bravery in all Ying Capital.

Now that bravery was scattered by the appearance of one man as lightly as breath dispersing smoke.

The same truth remained.

The Yan had come too quickly.

So quickly that enormous Ying Capital had no time to produce any effective, practical response.

Even though the Yan had delayed for a while after crushing the troops outside the city, that little interval was still no more than a cup of water against a burning cartload of firewood.

Still, at any time, cowards and men who flinched backward were always the majority.

Yet there would also always be a few righteous men whose blood surged hot enough to make them advance generously toward death.

Great Chu had stood for eight hundred years.

It could not possibly be so worthless that none remained.

Zhao Yuelin gave a carefree smile.

Saber in his right hand, reins in his left, ignoring the attempts of Qin Hai beside him to stop him, he urged his horse forward.

There was no other reason.

He merely sought death.

The ancestors of Chu’s nobles had followed the Marquis of Chu in opening the frontiers, driving the hundred Shanyue tribes into mountain gullies and tiny pools.

Their ancestors had cut roads through thorns and brambles.

After several centuries steeped in wealth and luxury, even hundred-times-forged steel would rust.

What hope did human bones have?

But when there were enough of anything, a few exceptions could always be found.

Zhao Yuelin knew perfectly well that riding forward meant certain death.

Yet he rode forward smiling.

At the very end, he discovered that he still could not escape the romantic atmosphere belonging both to the nobles and to Great Chu.

This way of dying was beautiful.

It was romantic.

Was it not?

Yet Zhao Yuelin was not the man charging farthest ahead.

With the greater situation already broken, Ma Lao’wu, Cui Buddha-Hand, and Chen Lotus did not retreat.

Most of the jianghu men around them had run, but nearly half still remained. Seeing these three “Mount Tais and Northern Dippers” of Ying Capital’s jianghu continue forward, they too roared and charged.

Back at Snow Sea Pass, when Count Pingye once drank tea with the Sword Saint, he had imitated the tone of the then Marquis of Jingnan and joked:

“The jianghu truly cannot rise onto the stage before the court.”

The Sword Saint smiled and answered:

“The court is too high, up in Heaven. The jianghu is too low, on the ground. Things that are too high are like clouds. Blow once and they scatter. Things that are too low lie in the mud. Step on them, and no matter what, some of that mud will splash onto your trouser legs.”

And now these jianghu men were precisely that mud.

They understood perfectly well how helpless so-called jianghu heroes became before a proper military formation.

The direct descendants and disciples of Ma Lao’wu’s family had served in the army for generations.

Cui Buddha-Hand’s ancestor had been a personal guard of a Chu emperor.

How could either man fail to understand what awaited jianghu experts who faced elite soldiers in formation?

Everyone envied the Sword Saint for cutting down more than a thousand Savage riders outside Snow Sea Pass.

But how could everyone be the Sword Saint?

And besides, after that day, had even the Sword Saint ever reproduced the same glory?

At that time, the Savage cavalry had already fallen into chaos after their retreat was cut. Once they saw Gelimu killed, they had actually been on the edge of total collapse.

Far too many coincidences had combined to create that classic battle, turning it into a jianghu tale worth retelling for a full sixty-year cycle.

A legendary tale became legendary precisely because it could not be obtained whenever one wished.

The jianghu men came roaring forward in a dense mass.

Prince of Jingnan remained motionless atop his Pixiu.

His gaze was cool.

It had already passed beyond the crowd before him and settled at the far end of the Imperial Avenue stretching away from the gate tower.

There stood Great Chu’s imperial palace.

Long ago, Count Pingye had taken the Princess to Yanjing to receive an imperial audience.

Count Pingye had laughingly told Emperor Yan that the Princess said Great Yan’s palace truly could not compare with Great Chu’s.

The Dragon Countenance was greatly pleased!

And in truth, she had been right.

Qian was rich, broad in territory, abundant in resources, and densely populated.

But the State of Qian had existed for barely more than a century. Before that, through the long interval after Great Xia collapsed, that richest region had suffered the chaos of Six Dynasties and Twelve Kingdoms.

Great Chu was different.

From the day the Marquis of Chu opened the frontiers and the Xiong Clan founded the state, Great Chu had continuously expanded outward.

North, it met the Jin lands.

West, it met Qian.

For centuries, Ying Capital had stood here in peace and quiet.

Naturally, its imperial palace was magnificent and resplendent, displaying the true bearing of an imperial house.

But so what?

In the end, he had fought his way here.

The righteous volunteers had already charged up.

The cavalry beside and behind Prince of Jingnan urged their horses forward to meet them.

Fortunately, Ying Capital’s avenue was extremely broad.

Cavalry did not feel particularly cramped here and could still maneuver.

The black flood crashed into the crowd.

Blood and gore exploded.

Human beings were made of flesh and blood.

A Martial Artist might possess a somewhat stronger body, but before cultivation crossed the necessary threshold, that difference still could not be treated as absolute.

More importantly, if the jianghu had experts, how could the army lack them?

After the first cavalry charge passed through, one portion of the Yan riders began chasing fugitives. Another portion wheeled its horses, preparing to plow the same ground a second time.

Psh!

Ma Lao’wu hacked off one rider’s arm, flipped upward, dragged the Yan cavalryman from his horse, and mounted it himself.

“Raise!”

On the gate tower, along the walls, and behind the entrance, Yan bowmen and crossbowmen raised their weapons.

They seized the interval after the two sides had passed one another and loosed.

Ma Lao’wu, only just mounted, used his own blood and qi to block the arrows.

Then the first shaft penetrated his body.

His body trembled.

His blood and qi faltered.

The second arrow came.

Then the third.

Then the fourth...

Very quickly, Ma Lao’wu had been shot into a hedgehog.

Even the horse beneath him collapsed into the pool of blood.

During the first cavalry charge, Cui Buddha-Hand had shattered the internal organs of four warhorses in succession with his palms. He then snatched a cavalry saber barehanded from one Yan rider and sent it back into the man’s body, driving the edge into his back.

But in the next instant, a Lieutenant Commander in the Yan ranks hurled a meteor hammer.

The iron chain wrapped around Cui Buddha-Hand’s neck.

The officer’s arm strength, combined with the speed of his warhorse, lifted Cui Buddha-Hand bodily from the ground.

A palm practitioner without the ground beneath his feet was like duckweed without roots.

Yan soldiers who had survived Heaven knew how many battles immediately swarmed him.

Cavalry sabers stabbed again and again into Cui Buddha-Hand’s unarmored body.

Ying Capital was only one city, so its jianghu was not vast.

But Ying Capital was immensely populous, so its jianghu ran deep.

Just as the wider jianghu had its Four Great Swordsmen, busybodies had ranked Four Great Sect Masters within Ying Capital.

Not wandering heroes who drifted from place to place.

To enter this list, a man had to establish a sect, found a lineage, and accept disciples.

Why Four Great Sect Masters?

You would have to ask why there were Four Great Swordsmen.

In any case, there were four.

Exactly four.

And so these four were the four.

Ma Lao’wu of the Ma Family Saber.

Cui Buddha-Hand of Buddha-Hand Street.

Chen Lotus of the Canal Gang.

And one more.

Double-Brow of Qingxu Temple in Ying Capital.

Double-Brow was a Qi Refiner.

People called him Double-Brow because where other men carried one ridge of brow, he seemed to have two.

Only today, he had not appeared.

Perhaps he was busy.

Perhaps sleepy.

Perhaps he had not heard the disturbance.

Or perhaps he had heard it and pretended he had not.

But now, two of Ying Capital’s Four Great Sect Masters were already dead.

Chen Lotus, by contrast, was not truly much stronger than the other two.

What he possessed was experience in killing formations.

The other two had been sect masters for many years. Behind them stood connections to the palace or army. They had never neglected their cultivation and still trained diligently.

But genuine life-and-death fighting?

They had seen far too little of it in recent years.

Chen Lotus lived around the docks.

Every so often an enemy came looking for revenge.

Every so often someone tried to assassinate him.

Good skill combined with good instincts allowed him to use his strength far more effectively.

After surviving the first cavalry charge, Chen Lotus still had several Canal Gang men around him. They were essentially gang death warriors he had personally trained.

Now, under his orders, they used their own flesh and blood to force open a road for him.

His sword moved with great spirit, like a lotus blooming.

But Chen Lotus’s swordsmanship did not follow the mainstream style of the Sword Saint of Jin or Baili Sword of Qian, in which every move sought death.

His style was three parts deflection, three parts guarding, three parts penetration, with the final part always held in reserve.

The avenue was broad.

But however broad an avenue might be, the contact surface during one cavalry charge was still limited.

By the time nearly all the gang brothers around him had fallen, Chen Lotus, protected by his sword, had forced his way through.

His target was the man beneath the princely banner.

Chen Lotus did not believe he could defeat that man.

Naturally, he was not deluded enough to believe he could kill him either.

A peak Martial Artist.

Just imagining how terrifying that body must be was enough to make one’s scalp prickle.

Even if the Sword Saint and Baili Sword stood here, with the sharpness of their swords, they would still need to peel away that body layer by layer before seeking an opportunity to strike.

Chen Lotus knew his own sword was far inferior to those legendary Four Great Swordsmen.

And this was not single combat.

But he still intended to stake everything on one attempt.

Break through the Yan riders obstructing him.

Reach that man.

And thrust out his sword.

Zhao Yuelin was already dead.

He had died early in the first cavalry charge.

There had been no suspense at all.

His noble status and his status as a Ninth Grade Martial Artist were equally meaningless in this situation.

But Zhao Yuelin lay on the ground with his face covered in blood, still smiling.

Yes.

That was why Chen Lotus now struggled so desperately to thrust out this one sword.

Nobles had their romance.

Scholars had their romance.

And him?

Looking back across the first half of his life, he had killed plenty of people who did not deserve to die.

He had done plenty of things that damaged his hidden virtue.

He knew he was not clean.

Nor had he ever cared to pretend he looked clean.

But just like his name, a lotus rising unstained from the mud, since death was certain anyway, he might as well allow himself one bloom before dying.

He broke through.

He advanced.

His movement technique was extremely fast.

Step after step carried him forward until afterimages seemed to trail behind him.

The personal guards beside Prince of Jingnan urged their horses forward with sabers raised, trying to stop him.

After two cavalry charges, an open space had appeared before the prince.

Yet Chen Lotus did not kill those guards.

He merely slipped around them.

His objective was simple and direct, so his heart carried no distractions.

The guards, by contrast, thought about too many possibilities and became constrained by them.

Then an officer holding a long spear suddenly planted himself before Prince of Jingnan.

The spear thrust out with an unstoppable momentum.

This was an expert.

An opponent no one could ignore.

Even if he left the army for the jianghu, he would possess enough ability to found a sect and establish a lineage.

Great Yan’s armies were naturally full of talented men.

Ordinary soldiers in the army cultivated too.

But before the rules of a battlefield, individual strength found it very difficult to produce a decisive effect.

Just like Cui Buddha-Hand and Ma Lao’wu, who had died so cleanly earlier.

Both were experts.

Both died quickly.

Because a battlefield had the rules of a battlefield.

They had faced veteran Jingnan cavalry skilled at fighting in formation, head-on.

Count Pingye had once discussed with Liang Cheng the most appropriate way to use experts like the Sword Saint on a battlefield, hoping to establish the right direction for future coaxing.

The conclusion was that the battle outside Snow Sea Pass had been far too classic.

Had Liang Cheng not arrived in time, the Sword Saint would have died there long ago.

Far too many coincidences combined to make that battle shine.

It would be extremely difficult to reproduce.

And no one was willing to reproduce it deliberately.

Throwing the Sword Saint onto a frontal battlefield would be like, in later generations, making a squad of special forces or a whole group of “soldier kings” charge through enemy artillery on the very front line.

Sure, the revolutionary cause supposedly made no distinction in division of labor.

But deliberately throwing specialists into the main battle line to experience the equality of all living beings was simply far too wasteful.

So now the Sword Saint was responsible only for Count Pingye’s personal security.

If necessary, one could still persuade him to remove one specific target or deal with an enemy expert.

As for throwing him into a sea of soldiers to take a bath?

They had tried that before.

The effect was genuinely poor.

During the battle at East Mountain Fort, even after the Sword Saint took action, his influence on the battlefield remained extremely limited.

It had been far less important than Jin Shuke’s cavalry suddenly cutting in.

But one could not call Cui Buddha-Hand and the others fools.

They had originally intended to use themselves as a surprise force. After leaving the city, they planned to strike the rear of the Yan army or something similar.

Who could have expected the Imperial Clan Guards outside the city to prove so useless that they collapsed outright?

That turned this intended surprise force into a crowd standing directly in front of the enemy.

The officer now blocking Chen Lotus was named Chen Chong, heir to the Chen Family Spear of Yan.

Only

Chen Chong thrust out his spear with complete confidence and discovered in shock that Chen Lotus made no attempt whatsoever to block.

Psh!

The long spear entered Chen Lotus’s body.

Chen Lotus sent out his sword.

It was not a famous sword.

It was only the ordinary blade that had accompanied him from long ago, when he first grew up and fought for territory.

He owned one sword forged by a great Chu Swordsmith, but that sword remained in his collection.

He did not use it.

Not because it was poor.

He simply was not accustomed to it.

One sword flew out.

Chen Chong turned his head.

Then his heart relaxed.

The sword flew quickly.

Quickly for ordinary men.

But before a true expert, its speed was not impressive.

In Chen Chong’s judgment, the prince needed only tilt his head slightly to avoid it.

Yet

Prince of Jingnan did not tilt his head and use the easiest method to evade.

His entire body rose from the Pixiu’s back.

The sword passed beneath him.

Then suddenly it stopped.

The blade froze in midair.

It began trembling.

As though it were about to explode.

That position was exactly the height where Prince of Jingnan’s head had been while he sat upon the Pixiu.

The Southern Marquis stamped one foot onto the blade.

Boom!

The sword was driven straight into the ground.

Its earlier trembling vanished.

The feeling that it was about to explode disappeared too.

Instead, streams of blood began seeping from the sword.

Not far away, the roof of a civilian house split open.

A long-bearded old man flew out.

On his face were two layers of eyebrows.

Double-Brow.

He had arrived long ago.

He had arrived earliest of all.

But apart from Chen Lotus, no one knew he was here.

That was why, at the final moment, Chen Lotus had exhausted everything to thrust out this sword, willingly allowing himself to be run through by a spear.

He believed the sword, prepared in advance, possessed a chance of taking the Southern Marquis’s life.

If it exploded beside the Southern Marquis’s head.

But there was no if.

Everyone beneath Heaven knew Great Yan’s Southern Marquis was a Martial Artist at the peak of the Third Grade, terrifyingly powerful.

Very few knew that he also understood a little of the occult arts.

How much “a little” actually meant was open to debate.

Tian Wujing himself genuinely believed he understood only a little.

What he had truly studied was warfare.

As for his Martial Artist cultivation?

Mm.

He understood a little of that too.

Back then, the Sword Saint had stripped away Prince of Jingnan’s physical defenses layer by layer. At the final moment, Prince of Jingnan forcibly sealed him with an occult art, leaving the Sword Saint no choice but to withdraw in defeat.

The Sword Saint quickly walked out of the shadow of that defeat.

But he did not possess some peculiar habit of wandering around telling everyone exactly how he had lost to Tian Wujing.

Very few people knew what had actually happened.

Count Pingye knew.

The Demon Kings knew.

Li Liangting knew.

Seventh Uncle, who had always protected the Commandery Princess, knew.

But none of those people would speak about it.

First, they were not people from whom information could easily be coaxed.

Second, there was no real need to mention it.

Peak Third Grade Martial Artist was the standard label for Prince of Jingnan’s strength.

Those occult arts were genuinely only little side amusements, something for cultivating the temperament.

There had indeed been some whispers in the jianghu because the night Tian Wujing exterminated his own clan, fluctuations associated with Qi Refiners appeared above the Tian residence.

But that was not meaningful evidence.

It proved nothing with certainty.

Even now, inside the archives of the Phoenix Nest Guards in Ying Capital, one dossier remained.

It recorded one matter.

Last year, when the Commandery Princess entered Snow Sea Pass, rumors said she was afflicted by evil forces from the Tianduan Mountains and fell unconscious.

Her carriage was later sent to Fengxin City, apparently so Prince of Jingnan could remove the affliction.

But afterward, the Commandery Princess’s carriage left Fengxin City again.

In Yingdu, a sorcerer was found to perform rites.

Only after she returned to Yanjing did she recover completely.

Based on that intelligence, the Phoenix Nest Guards concluded that the Southern Marquis of Yan did not understand these occult arts.

At most, he knew a little superficial theory.

Otherwise, how could one explain the Southern Marquis choosing to stand by and let the daughter of the Marquis of Zhenbei Residence remain unconscious?

Who beneath Heaven could possibly make the Southern Marquis willing to let his own niece die without saving her?

Unfortunately, the Sword Saint was not here.

If he had seen this scene, he would definitely have burst out laughing.

The Sword Saint possessed ordinary human emotions too.

He himself had been overturned by exactly this move from Tian Wujing.

And now another fool had actually tried to use this sort of trick to ambush Tian Wujing.

An ambush of this kind was exceptionally dangerous.

If you were plotting against someone and he remained completely unaware, perhaps you could succeed.

But once he noticed, or if he actually possessed the ability to use the same methods to counter you, then you had effectively placed your own heart into his hands.

After Double-Brow flew onto the roof, he immediately tried to use his movement art and flee again.

His abdomen was visibly swollen.

Extremely swollen.

His expression was twisted with pain, so violently that the two clear layers of eyebrows on his face nearly seemed to merge into one.

Tian Wujing lifted his foot.

The sword beneath it trembled and instinctively tried to fly away.

In the next instant, Tian Wujing’s aura crushed it down again.

His foot came down once more.

This time with real force.

Crack!

The sword snapped into two pieces.

Double-Brow, who had just leapt into the air, had his abdomen explode in midair.

A cloud of blood mist scattered above the street.

Tian Wujing bent down.

He reached out and brushed the dust from the surface of his boot.

In Tian Wujing’s eyes, the jianghu had always been no more than a cold appetizer.

Occasionally there were exquisite dishes that could be brought to the table.

They looked as though they had joined the banquet.

But they could never replace the main course.

Still, the flavor of Ying Capital’s jianghu was not bad.

Quite appetizing.

Tian Wujing did not mount his Pixiu again.

Instead, he began walking.

Step by step, he followed the avenue forward.

To crush the Three Great States and unite all the Xia realms had been his childhood ambition.

For that dream, he had paid too much.

Sacrificed too much.

Lost even more.

Now, he wanted to walk personally over the blue-brick paving stones of Ying Capital.

To feel them.

To put his feet firmly upon them.

To measure with his own steps this imperial capital he had personally conquered.

Half a lifetime of bitterness for this one moment of sweetness.

The Jingnan cavalry who had followed their prince into the city re-formed around him and guarded him in their center.

One man walked.

Thousands marched.

They proceeded south down the great avenue for a very long distance.

Both sides of the road remained quiet.

Too quiet.

Only the muffled sobs of women and children could occasionally be heard.

It was almost as though all the blood and courage in this capital had already been drained clean at the city gate by the deaths of those jianghu men.

Tian Wujing found himself somewhat dissatisfied.

Chu people always emphasized rites and loved imitating antiquity.

Set aside whether he himself was an honored guest or an evil guest.

At the very least, a visitor was still a guest.

Receiving him in this cold and deserted manner violated the very standards of hospitality Chu people always boasted about.

Tian Wujing stopped.

He was dissatisfied.

Deeply dissatisfied.

Normally, he was a cold and distant man.

But he did not like this sort of lifeless coldness.

Especially not now.

Unfortunately, the Count who understood him best was not here.

Otherwise, he would not even have needed to speak.

That man would have taken the initiative to hurry the hosts along.

So in the next moment, the mighty Prince of Jingnan of Great Yan stood at the mouth of the street and shouted:

“Chu slaves. Serve the dishes.”

[End of Chapter 579]