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.
บท 5: The Intersection
บรรณาธิการ: Transn
Gu Shenwei stood up abruptly. Without really thinking, he wanted to go out and fight his enemies to the death, but his reasoning stopped him. No matter what the background of those killers was, even his father Gu Lun, Master Shifu Yang Zheng, and his two elder brothers were unable to hit back, so he could not withstand a single blow. Even his very survival to this point was a miracle.
New whistles came from all directions; some were long while others short, and some stopped only to find others start. They were like a flock of noisy predators, vying for food and they soon entered the ruins of the manor. With their noisy hoofbeats, it seemed like thousands of people were rushing in.
Just as Gu Shenwei lowered his body and hid behind a broken wall, a torch was thrown up into the air, flying over his head.
Before Gu Shenwei had any idea about what just happened, a big hand grabbed his neck from behind. Gu Shenwei's feet left the ground against his will after the person that grabbed him jumped on his horse.
Before the horse's hoof touched the ground, Gu Shenwei was suddenly released by the big hand and fell to the ground heavily. He cried out in pain and did not even get a chance to stand up before he rolled on the ground for a moment. He found himself surrounded by machetemen on horses. They looked like hungry wolves under the light of the torches, all of them greedily staring at their prey.
Life is like that. There is always rain after an earthquake, and strong winds follow the rain. Bad luck is like an attacked animal, whose dripping blood will always attract more predators, then scavengers, night walkers, flies, and tinier creatures, until their flesh and bones disappeared completely.
The destruction of the Gu family was like a deadly wound. The first batch of killers had finished their tasks and escaped unscathed. After that, a group of wolves and ravens followed.
They were dirty bandits and thieves, and their number was fewer than what Gu Shenwei had initially thought. In actuality, there were only five people, but the whistles, hooves, and torches seemingly magnified their numbers.
Gu Shenwei did not know the identities of these people, and he just took them as enemies. He was cornered like a young beast with a low roar in its throat, showing its claws which were not sharp.
A whip came in through the darkness, bringing Gu Shenwei to the ground again. All of these bandits laughed excitedly and one of them leaned over to grab the young man. He put the young man on the back of his horse and searched him without ceremony. Finding a small bag of silver in the young man's arms, the bandit raised it and shouted, "Hey, this kid is from the same trade. He took it before us!"
Understanding the identities of these people, Gu Shenwei suddenly flew into a rage. "Let me go!" he shouted, struggling to grab the parcel.
The bandit laughed louder. Not taking the young man seriously, he put the silver into his arms. He slapped the boy heavily on the back and pulled out the little oilskin packet.
Gu Shenwei's back hurt like hell. It felt as if it was broken. But what scared him more was the secret manuscript of Internal Strength that had been taken. It was the most precious relic of his family, even more important than his own life.
Blowing a whistle, the bandit tore off the oilskin from the packet. He was surprised to find that there was only a thin book inside. After turning a few pages, he did not know any of the words in the book.
"What the hell is this?" The bandit was furious.
"Give it back to me!" Gu Shenwei rose up angrily.
The bandit punched Gu Shenwei in the face, almost knocking him out. The bandit dropped the book and took out some rope to tie him up, and then jumped down and followed the others into the ruins to look for valuables.
Since Gu Shenwei's hands and feet were tied, he could only wriggle like a worm. After struggling desperately for a few seconds, he fell down from the horse to the ground, and then he tried to crawl toward the book.
As he was about to get to the book, a strong wind blew over the ground. The flame of a nearby torch that had been thrown away by a robber was blowing like a snake's tongue. When the flame touched the pages of the book, it instantly caught fire.
It was painful to see his book burning. What he regretted most was that he did not build a solid foundation of his family's Kung Fu. Now, he could not even fight an ordinary bandit.
He rolled over on top of the book to put out the fire, and then hurried to get off the torch beside him. Carrying the book in his mouth, he got further away from the fire. Finally, the family's secret manuscript was saved, but only parts of it because the first few pages were almost burned out.
He looked at the book with pity and was surprised at the words in the book. He knew every word in it, but it was an account book, nothing related to Internal Strength!
The book, which was so difficult to find and save from being lost, was not the shortcut manual of "Yin and Yang Strength". Gu Shenwei was very disappointed because the secret manuscript was extremely important to his simple plan of revenge. And due to his weak Kung Fu foundation, it would take him at least 30 years to be able to avenge his family without the secret manuscript.
The shortcut manual to mastering "Yin and Yang Strength" had a lot of side-effects, so former masters of the Gu family used to hide it carefully, and no descendants were allowed to read it. It was said that an ancestor had practiced "Yin and Yang Strength" according to the secret manuscript, which made his Internal Strength more powerful and his strength double. With Gu family's skills with the sword and spear, he became very famous at the time, but three years later, he suddenly died mysteriously in a very terrible way.
Gu Shenwei just wanted to avenge his family, so he did not care about the effects after three years. But now, he even had lost all hope in fighting his enemies to the death.
Those bandits thoroughly plundered the ruins. Within half an hour, they all went back to the courtyard, carrying several packets and blowing their whistles as they were preparing to leave.
Gu Shenwei's captor came back as well and put two packets on the horse's back. His plunder was not as good as the others, so he was not in a good mood. He went over to the boy and gave him a good kick.
Gu Shenwei curled up in pain. The bandit grabbed him by the ropes on his body and tried to carry him back onto his horse.
Suddenly, Gu Shenwei realized something. The oilskin-wrapped book was thrown into sight, revealing a corner of a white handkerchief. Before it was picked up, he bit at a corner of the white handkerchief. He had taken the entire white handkerchief in his mouth while he was lying on the horse's back.
After mounting their horses, the bandits left the manor and went downhill.
There was another bandit near the village at the foot of the hill, guarding a dozen captives and more than 30 cattle and sheep. The captives' arms were tightly tied together. Gu Shenwei was also thrown onto the ground and tied to the back of one of the other captives.
The six bandits drove the captives and the animals to the east. Gu Shenwei struggled to follow them, having no time to spit out the white handkerchief.
When the sun was rising, these bandits stopped at a T-junction. Gu Shenwei thought it was not too far from his home. He rarely left the manor, so he had no impression of how far this road was.
They went through a narrow dirt road running north to south through a mountain. They took a main road that went east to west after negotiating the winding road for a few miles, seeing hundreds of people gathering at the intersection.
Most people were dressed in scruffy leather coats. Shining in the morning sun, their coats were so oily that they seemed to have never been washed. Everyone was armed and had fierce eyes, they just looked like a herd of animals being forced to gather in a heap.
There were distinct factions among the bandits. They were divided into several groups, keeping a vigilant eye on each other. Their hands were always placed near their weapons, ready to fight each other at any moment.
What was really weird was that these fierce bandits all squeezed in the western part of the intersection, but none of them went over to the empty area on the opposite side, as if there was a ghost hidden there.
What was even weirder was that all the bandits were looking at the northern mountain pass, as if they were waiting for someone.
Four hours before, Gu Shenwei thought he had the "Will of the Divine". Unexpectedly, he became a captive of these bandits, mixed up with a bunch of dirty and panicked men and women.
Among all the captives, Gu Shenwei was the dirtiest. With sweat, dust, and bone-ashes covering his whole body, he just looked like a clay sculpture.
As these bandits were not paying attention to him, Gu Shenwei spat the white handkerchief out of his mouth. No daring to check it, he slipped it into his pocket secretly. Knowing that he had already been searched once, he hoped he would not be searched again.
The person the bandits were waiting for had not turned up, so they started to become restless and began to curse. They were not used to being so close to their peers. Two groups of them had fought with each other, and several of them were injured. But fortunately, none of them were killed.
Gu Shenwei still did not know why he was taken. There were so many bandits gathered near the Gu family's manor. It was said that such bandits had been wiped out a few years ago. He looked up at the bandit who caught him and tried to get some clue from him.
This bandit, like all the others, was dressed in a leather coat even on this hot summer day. He was strongly built, with a thick beard on his dirty face, and a scar on his left cheek.
The scarred bandit felt the glare from below. He looked down at the young captive with a relentless gaze and said, "What don't you run?"
Gu Shenwei was not that stupid. He stood in the midst of all these bandits, surrounded by the endless Gobi Desert. To escape meant certain death. In addition, his hands were tied to a group of captives.
"You've got the money, why not let me go?"
Gu Shenwei's tone was tough, but he knew that he was just money in the eyes of a bandit, the same as all the other men, women, and animals.
The scarred bandit spat on the ground, and his thick saliva just brushed across Gu Shenwei's scalp. He refused to answer the question.
An old bandit looked at the gang of thieves and their captives with a gloomy face. Suddenly, he said, "Not enough plunder, Eagle."
The scarred bandit called "Eagle" spat again and said, "The tiger has left no food behind."
Gu Shenwei was shocked, thinking that this "tiger" must be the people who killed off his entire family. These bandits obviously knew all the details of the killing. He had been thinking that it would be hard to find these killers, who might hide their whereabouts after taking out the Gu family.
The old bandit glanced at him once more and maybe saw something special in Gu Shenwei's eyes. He said nothing more and turned his head to continue looking across the mountain pass to the north.
Gu Shenwei waited for a long time but no one mentioned the topic of "tiger" again, so he had to ask, "Is the tiger that you are following a big one?"
The bandit named Eagle closed his lips, as if he had not heard him. After a while, he said coldly, "Nonsense, is there any tiger bigger than Supreme King?"
Supreme King.
There was no one in the Western Region who did not know about Supreme King.
Suddenly, he became very depressed because the power of his enemy was way beyond his expectations.
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