บท 3: Pursuers
บรรณาธิการ: Transn
The old servant, Yang Zheng, led the way. During the night, the group crossed a meadow, climbed over a hill, then turned to the only road without lush grass near the manor. After taking another step, they entered a totally different world that was full of hard clay and rubble. Ming Xiang groaned in fear.
Gu Shenwei was still only half-awake the entire time. The march in the night, elder sister's marriage, and the short sword at his waist were all so surreal. It was not until the sky began turning bright that he came to his senses and surprisingly found that the sun was coming up from behind them.
"Um, are we going west?" Cuilan's husband's family lived in the Central Plains and the marriage was arranged when they were very young. They should be going straight eastward to get to the Central Plains.
Yang Zheng mumbled a little as if the young Master's question was not worth a reply. After a while, he said, "We will go to Shu-lik City first where the officers and soldiers will escort us."
"Shu-lik City!" Gu Shenwei exclaimed with surprise. Shu-lik was the largest kingdom in the Western Region. Strictly speaking, the Gu's manor was located in the same kingdom. Its capital, broad and densely populated, was one of the most prosperous places in the Western Region. Gu Shenwei had heard of it before but had never seen it in the two years since they moved here.
Gu Lun had been a senior officer in the Central Plains, so Gu Shenwei did not think it was strange to be escorted by the soldiers of Shu-lik. He only thought that their procession was not majestic enough.
Miss Cuilan had been sitting on the horse, seemingly having no objection to this arrangement. Gu Shenwei recovered and kept pace with his elder sister, talking about if there would be something interesting to see in Shu-lik City. He pulled out the short sword and waved it around like a master. Cuilan kept quiet and only said a few words to occasionally remind her brother to be careful.
Although she was only three years older than him, Cuilan had been nursing her naughty brother like a mother.
Because there were two girls, they moved slowly. The midday sun was blazing and Yang Zheng did not want to stop to rest. Cuilan and the maid already felt tired, but they tried to hang on. Caring about his sister and being unable to endure the head-on exposure of the sun any longer, Gu Shenwei yelled out for water and a meal.
Just then, the faint sound of hooves came from behind them.
Yang Zheng jumped down from his horse and listened carefully for a moment. He unfastened his frequently used lance from the right side of the horse and stood in the middle of the road, looking majestic with his white hair fluttering in the wind.
Everyone retreated to the side of the road except for Gu Shenwei, whose eyes twinkled. He pulled out his short sword and stood shoulder to shoulder with Yang Zheng.
"Sister, don't be afraid. I'll fight the bandits!"
"Don't stand in my way." Yang Zheng raised the lance and put the young Master behind him with the lance rod. He had a high status in the Gu family and was unkind to everyone but Old Master Gu Lun. Moreover, Gu Shenwei was technically his apprentice.
Gu Shenwei waved his short sword around and tried to fight for a chance to kill the enemy. He saw a cloud of dust in the distance and knew that their pursuers had arrived.
Three men in black stopped their horses about 20 paces away from Gu Shenwei and pulled out their broadswords together.
"The Gu's should go back home," said the man-in-black in the middle, whose voice was as chilling as rusty iron.
"Nobody is going back home." Yang Zheng stood up with the lance.
The Gu family were good at both knives and spears, with the knife skills having been practiced before the spear skills. Being especially proficient in spear skills, Yang Zheng was not frightened at all to face three enemies.
The man-in-black on the left rode toward Yang Zheng, waving his blade.
Yang Zheng made the lance point upward and squatted slightly with his legs apart, just like a farmer holding a pickaxe to fight an evil wolf.
When the man-in-black approached with his broadsword high up in the air to chop Yang Zheng to pieces, Yang Zheng stabbed the lance out suddenly.
The stab was simple and smooth with no tricks and seemingly so weak that a child could dodge it, but the man-in-black was hit right in the chest. He fell down with his broadsword without a sound while his horse kept running for a while and eventually stopped on its own.
The other two involuntarily urged their horses to take two steps back.
Gu Shenwei ran forward excitedly. He had never thought his Master Shifu was this powerful and even actively complained about the family's spear skills. Yang Zheng had been practicing the same movements every day for many years and never practiced any other movements. Gu Shenwei never expected such a simple stab to be so powerful, and now he had a new appreciation of his Master Shifu and the family's spear skills.
The remaining two attackers glanced at each other, then raised their broadswords and rode toward Yang Zheng, attempting to launch a double-pronged attack.
Gu Shenwei came forward as he wanted to test the power of his own short sword. In fact, he had never learned swordsmanship and had only practiced some knife forms absent-mindedly. To him, there was no difference between swords and knives.
Again, Yang Zheng put the young Master behind him with the lance rod and squatted slightly with the spear pointing forward as though he only knew this move.
Sometimes, one move was enough. Yang Zheng had been immersed in the ways of the Gu Spear Form for several decades. No matter if it was raining or snowing, he practiced stabbing at least a thousand times a day and never stopped. Although seemingly to be an ordinary movement in the eyes of others, it could form 10,000 movements in his mind. More practice would only make it more beautiful.
Old Master Gu Lun was the only one who understood his mindset. After all, Gu Lun taught this spear form to Yang Zheng. Gu Lun often sighed and said that the Gu Spear Form skill could only be inherited by someone with the family name.
Therefore, Yang Zheng was loyal to the Gu family and would not allow anyone to hurt the young Master and Miss as long as he was alive.
The two men-in-black came at him.
Yang Zheng stabbed two times so quickly that it seemed to have hit the two men at the same time.
One man silently fell off his horse while the other screeched and shook a few times without falling off the horse. He squeezed his legs and lowered his body to make the horse run westward.
Yang Zheng turned around and raised the lance in one hand, aimed for a moment, and threw the three-meter lance. It flew as steady and fast as a javelin.
30 paces away, the man-in-black was speared straight through the chest and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
"Master Shifu Yang!" Gu Shenwei exclaimed both happily and respectfully, "Teach me those lance skills, please!"
"Poke the target 500 times a day and you will get initial success in three years. Then after that point, do it 1,000 times per day and in 10 years, you will get it."
"Then it would be better to practice 'Yin and Yang Strength', which will make me stronger in 10 years."
"Ah, okay." Yang Zheng walked over to the body, pulled out the lance, wiped the blood on it with the clothes of the fallen man, rode on his horse, and hurried on with the journey. He would not keep in mind the young Master's enthusiasm, nor the three dead bodies left on the road.
Yin and Yang Strength, the Internal Strength technique handed down through the generations of the Gu family, was the foundation for the martial arts of the Gu family. It was not taught to daughters or people outside of the family. Although being deeply trusted by Gu Lun, Yang Zheng had not been entitled to learn it.
Gu Shenwei had been doing Yin and Yang Strength for about 10 years now, but he was still stuck at the first rudimentary layer. This made him the slowest among all the descendants of the Gu family.
As the group moved on, Gu Shenwei grew very interested in the origin of the bandits. Yang Zheng said nothing and so Gu Shenwei could only discuss the topic with Ming Xiang. His sister, Cuilan, and the maid, Chrysan, slowly recovered from the shock of the attack and chimed in occasionally.
After talking for about two hours, Gu Shenwei's enthusiasm was running out, but Yang Zheng suddenly said,
"He was a great Kung Fu master."
"Who was?" asked Gu Shenwei.
"The one who almost got away."
"Him? I thought he was pretty average because he was stabbed by you without applying any skills. No, he was strong, but our family's spear form is more powerful, isn't it?"
"Haha."
Yang Zheng did not argue anymore. Contests between masters often came down to a few tricks. The one beaten by one movement might not be much worse than the winner. The situation might be reversed if the location or the timing was different. It was hard to clearly explain the subtleties of fighting to outsiders. Although Gu Shenwei had the surname Gu and had been studying Kung Fu for a long time, he was still regarded as an "outsider".
After a long ride, Yang Zheng finally stopped to rest when it was getting dark. There were neither villages nor shops around, so they could only sit on the rocks along the roadside to rest.
After a hard day's journey, Gu Shenwei was exhausted and sat down close to his sister. Ming Xiang and Chrysan found some food and water from the packs and served their masters.
Yang Zheng had a couple of bites and kept looking eastward vigilantly.
Gu Shenwei was a little dismissive of Master Shifu Yang's excessive caution. Master Shifu Yang not only learned the spear skills from his father, but also his inflexible nature. Who dared to chase them when there were three bodies lying on the road?
"Master Huan, there is an important task that needs to be done. Would you like to do it?" Only Yang Zheng called Gu Shenwei "Master Huan".
"Sure. Is it related to the bandits?" Gu Shenwei sprang to his feet in excitement.
"Yes, but this is not an easy thing to do, so you don't have to."
"The harder the better," said a proud Gu Shenwei, holding the handle of his sword.
"I want you to ride to Shu-lik City to get reinforcements."
"Reinforcements? Aren't the bandits dead?"
"There may be more bandits."
"You can kill one with one movement, and I can kill one with... two, and by doing so, we can kill them all."
"But there may be too many bandits for the two of us to protect the Miss."
Gu Shenwei glanced at his sister, Cuilan. "Good idea. I'll go. Who should I look for? The king?"
"No, go to Shu-lik City and find Marshal Yang. Just tell him that Yang Zheng needs his help and he will understand."
"Ok."
Gu Shenwei stood up and went to mount his horse, but was stopped when Yang Zheng grabbed him. "Change clothes with Ming Xiang, yours are not suitable for riding."
The more serious Yang Zheng was about the situation, the more excited Gu Shenwei was. However, Ming Xiang, who was pulled by the young Master and asked to change clothes, seemed somewhat reluctant.
The only thing that annoyed Gu Shenwei was that Yang Zheng confiscated his short sword and told him that he would not need it on the way. "Ride straight west at top speed and you can arrive in Shu-lik City within one day and night."
Gu Shenwei jumped onto his horse and all his fatigue disappeared without a trace. He gave his sister a big smile as he said, "I'll be back!"
He was so excited that he did not ask for any more details. He did not even realize that he carried nothing and would have to solve the problem of eating and drinking along the way.
The young Master rode as far as he could and became a small black dot on the horizon. Looking at her brother's figure, Cuilan suddenly said with a sigh, "I hope the horse can run fast enough and he won't turn around."
Yang Zheng's face softened slightly. Although the Miss was young and gentle-natured, she also had good insight and was capable of understanding what this meant.
"Pardon me, Miss. I've thought it over and over in my head, and I can only save one of you," Yang Zheng said sadly, getting down on one knee.
"Uncle Yang, please rise. To save my brother is to save the whole Gu family. How could you feel guilty?"
Ming Xiang and Chrysan did not understand what the Miss was saying, but felt uneasy.
บท 4: Family Massacre
บรรณาธิการ: Transn
Gu Shenwei pinched his leg very hard to expel the drowsiness that he felt. He had been riding his horse for almost a whole night. He was so tired and dizzy that he realized just how hard it was to ride a horse. In the days when they moved from the Central Plains to the Western Region, he scarcely felt how severe the Gobi Desert was because he was curled up in his family's arms.
He held the horse steady as he saw two roads in front of him, one leading north and the other leading south. Master Shifu Yang had just told him to go west, but he mentioned nothing about north or south...
Fortunately, there were pedestrians on the road. However, no one that he met could speak Central Plains Chinese.
Gu Shenwei was so concerned about the task that Master Shifu Yang handed to him that he could not bear to wait on the road. He just chose to go north. After a while, he finally met a group of herdsmen. One of them, who was fluent in Central Plains Chinese, told Gu Shenwei that he had been going the wrong way. When he heard that the boy wanted to find "Marshal Yang", he could not help laughing out loud.
"There is no Marshal Yang in the capital, nor in the entire Shu-lik."
"My Master Shifu Yang said there is, so there must be." Gu Shenwei was quite certain, thinking that a herdsman had probably never seen a dignitary.
"Haha, your Master Shifu must be a good joker. In Shu-lik, we don't have any marshals. We only have generals and commandants. Even if we needed a marshal, why should we choose someone by the name of Yang from the Central Plains?"
Those herdsmen laughed and left, leaving Gu Shenwei alone.
Gu Shenwei was not a fool. He was just a little innocent because he had never been cheated. The biggest setback in his life was being bullied by his two elder brothers, so it was easy for him to believe and accept everything told by his father and his Master Shifu. Once he began to think it over, he immediately found the whole thing strange from beginning to end.
A sense of foreboding was rising in the boy's heart.
Gu Shenwei turned the horse back toward the original road with his face stretching tightly. He realized that he had been left out of his family's affairs, which made him feel bad. He wondered how his father and Yang Zheng would explain all this to him when they met again.
Gu Shenwei did not meet his sister and the others until noon. A trade caravan group came from the east and everybody was flustered as if they had just been robbed. One of them kindly yelled to the boy, who was riding alone.
"Turn back! Turn back!"
Gu Shenwei ignored the kind shout, with a knot of tension in his stomach. His horse was already frothing at the mouth, but he continued to push it past its limits with his whip.
Half an hour later, he saw a lance erected on the side of the road, shaking slightly like a flagpole without a flag.
There was a head on the top of the lance, with white tousled hair fluttering in the wind.
As Gu Shenwei approached, he recognized that it was his Master Shifu, Yang Zheng, the old servant of the Gu family, with his eyes wide open, seemingly unconvinced of his own death.
He once stabbed three men with a lance, but only one night later, he was beheaded. It was highly possible that the man who had killed him wanted to show his strength to passersby by putting Yang Zheng's head on the top of the lance.
Gu Shenwei then noticed several dead bodies lying on the ground.
Yang Zheng's body was lying down by the lance without any injuries. The killer took his head off with only one move, which was very impressive. Gu Shenwei could not imagine what a powerful Kung Fu master the killer was.
There were three more bodies. One of them was the maid, Chrysan. Her breasts and face were full of cuts, and her clothes were dyed red from her blood. She did not have any fighting skill, but it seemed that the killer used a few more moves to torture her.
Another one of the bodies was Ming Xiang, who was dressed in the young Master's clothes. Gu Shenwei could only judge the identity of the body by his clothes because Ming Xiang's head was missing. It was neither on the top of the lance, nor in the vicinity.
Gu Shenwei fell off his horse and fell to his knees. He could not help throwing up until he had nothing to vomit from his stomach. He forced himself to look at the last body because that one was different.
What made Gu Shenwei slightly reassured was that the last body was not his sister's. It was a teenager who was as old as Gu Shenwei. He was as scarred and bruised as Chrysan, but looked strange because Gu Shenwei had never seen him before.
Gu Shenwei jumped on his horse and continued to ride eastward. He wanted to know where his sister was and went home to figure out what was going on.
To his knowledge, the Gu family had no enemies in neither the Central Plains nor the Western Region.
At dusk, Gu Shenwei returned to the village at the foot of the manor's hill, where more than a dozen villagers here were tenant farmers of the Gu family. At ordinary times, there should be a scene of smoke curling up from the kitchen, but today, all the doors were closed with no signs of smoke.
Looking up at the hill, the manor of the Gu family had been burned to ashes.
Gu Shenwei arrived at the gate and jumped off his horse, standing still. He was in a daze, looking at the dark ruins as if he were trapped in a strange dream and could not wake up no matter how much he struggled.
Was the home just gone? Were all these people just dead?
Gu Shenwei stepped onto the broken tiles and cracked logs, which were still warm, and looked through all the rooms as if the roofs and walls were still there.
It was a massacre. Every dead body was left in place, burnt beyond recognition. However, Gu Shenwei could still roughly recognize them according to their positions.
His father, Gu Lun, lay side by side with his mother, Mrs. Gu, and both of their heads were cut off. Gu Shenwei had to wade through the covered bricks and wooden blocks to see their small bones. How could Gu Lun, a Kung Fu master, a great hero in his son's eyes, never notice the enemy?
His two elder brothers also lay in the same place, with their heads off as well. They died quietly, without any chance to show their skills, which had been practiced for more than 10 years.
The manor servants were all dead with full bodies. It seemed that the killers were only interested in the heads of the masters.
But the elder sister was still missing. There were only the bodies of the three maids in her room. Although they were burnt, Gu Shenwei was still able to recognize that none of them was his sister.
This young boy, who had a carefree childhood and had been very loved, suddenly faced the destruction of his family. His first feeling was fear. Now that his home was gone, who would protect and guide him in the future?
He had thought of entering the world of adults after his sister's marriage, but in an instant, he found himself left alone in a strange world with an uncertain future.
Gradually, the young man's heart was overtaken by anger. He wanted to get his sister back, avenge his family, and kill all of his family's enemies, no matter how many there were and where they came from.
Once he got the idea of revenge, Gu Shenwei suddenly came to his senses. He could not go at the enemies empty-handed. He needed some money and equipment.
The manor was pillaged by the killers and most of the property had been swept away, but there was always a catch.
Gu Shenwei had never cared about the financial situation of his family, but at this moment, many details of his life flashed in his mind, which helped him deduce some small secrets.
He dug out a small bag of silver coins under his second brother's bed. When he pushed the body away, he nearly shed tears, but he choked them back. What could tears do? When he was a child, it might have been comforting and helpful, but now it just meant weakness and humiliation.
The road of vengeance was so long that he did not even have an idea who his enemies were. The most important thing, currently, was to deal with his family members' bodies.
No full bodies of the masters were left. There were only blackened skeletons that would break at the slightest touch. Gu Shenwei carefully cradled the remains of his two brothers to his parents' room and placed them side by side with the bodies of his parents.
In fact, it could not be called a "room" with collapsed walls, ashes, bricks, burnt wood, copperware, and a ruined roof. They were everywhere on the ground and it would soon become a grave, with dilapidated walls covered by grass.
Gu Shenwei had seen a village where the white bones became a den for the reptiles in the grass and were trampled upon by birds and beasts passing by.
He could not let his family suffer such torment after being without their full bodies.
Gu Shenwei suddenly steeled himself. He found a wall brick, kneeled on the ground and smashed the skeletons with the brick. He hit them so hard, as if he were hitting his enemies. He did not even notice when his face became covered with tears.
"God is not fair!"
Gu Shenwei shouted bitterly and scattered the ashes into the air. It was not fair for the Gu family to suffer such a fate. Although his father, Gu Lun, practiced Kung Fu, he had never been involved in any conflict of Jianghu, nor had he offended anyone in the imperial court. He was always tolerant and even weak sometimes.
"Perhaps my father had some enemies in the dark. But the Gu family had moved thousands of miles to the Western Region. Was there any unresolved hate that made them chase us all the way here?"
Gu Shenwei could not figure it out. He blamed it all on God. He grabbed a brick and threw it into the air.
It seemed that God still wanted to ridicule the young Master after treating the Gu family cruelly. The brick only flew a few feet, falling outside of the "door" at a mocking angle, and hit a flowerpot outside the "door".
The pomegranate tree in the flowerpot had turned into black wood, and the flowerpot had been burned so badly that it cracked into many pieces with a noise.
Gu Shenwei was already exhausted. After throwing the brick, he involuntarily fell to the ground on his hands and knees, panting, unable to even curse.
A moment later, the cruelty of God became a manifestation of wonder. Looking up, Gu Shenwei suddenly remembered something after he saw the soil, which was still in the shape of a flowerpot.
Then he ran out like a madman, with his hands pushing the scorched earth away and throwing the flower's roots aside. He dug out a small oilskin packet from the bottom of the flowerpot and pinched it slightly to make sure there was a book inside. He breathed a sigh of relief, tucked it carefully into his arms, and hid it behind the small silver parcel.
He remembered the scene that he had accidentally witnessed one night after they moved to the Western Region. His father put something in a flowerpot. At the time, he was so sleepy that he just felt puzzled about his father's behavior but he had made no careful analysis. At this moment, an idea appeared in his mind because he guessed what his father had hidden.
There was the shortcut manual to master the "Yin and Yang Strength" hidden in the book.
The "Yin and Yang Strength" included Nine Levels of Yin Strength and Nine Levels of Yang Strength. Although Gu Lun had been practicing it for the longest time, he could only merely reach the fifth level of Yin Strength and Yang Strength. However, there was a shortcut manual, which could greatly improve a person's power in a very short time. There was a latent danger about it, however, so few of the Gu family's descendants had practiced it.
The top level of the "Yin and Yang Strength" would supposedly be invincibility and Gu Shenwei deeply believed that. Suddenly, God was no longer the archcriminal for the disaster of the Gu family, for it showed Gu Shenwei a way to get revenge.
Seeing as how Gu Shenwei had just cursed God, he would like to call this miracle the "Will of the Divine". He was only 14 years old and had been living under the wing of his father and elder brothers. He had never thought that he would one day shoulder the burden of avenging his family. He even vaguely wished that the dead one was himself because he thought either of his brothers would be more suitable to avenge their family.
He needed the "Will of the Divine" to support the idea of revenge.
But now, the most important thing was to find his last remaining family member, his elder sister Cuilan, who had been doting on him. She might still be alive and be suffering somewhere.
The "Will of the Divine" played another joke at this moment. Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded outside the manor, which was heart-stopping in the silence of the night.
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