Left Alive Below the Cliff
The instant he went over, heaven and earth lost all order.
Fang Yingjie felt the ground vanish beneath his feet. It was as though some invisible giant hand had seized him at the lip of the cliff and flung him bodily into empty air. The wind roared at once in his ears, shrill and savage, skimming past his cheeks, his temples, the roots of his ears like countless fine, icy needles drilling straight into his bones. Grass-shadow, rock-shadow, tree-shadow, and the last dim light of dusk all whirled and overturned before his eyes. Up and down, left and right, east and west—nothing held still long enough to be known.
It was not that he did not want to cry out.
It was that the breath in his chest, just as it rose, was rammed back down his throat by the gale beating into him head-on. Soil, gravel, and torn grass collapsed away under him. He snatched wildly at the cliff edge by pure instinct, and his fingers only brushed a clutch of wet roots before they ripped loose with the mud. The blue cloth shoe on his right foot flew off in that first sliding wrench and vanished somewhere among the rocks. Before he could even think, there came a heavy thud, and his body smashed into an old tree growing sideways from the cliff face.
The blow landed with brutal force.
His left shoulder struck the trunk first. A heartbeat later his back scraped hard across it at an angle, and his vision went black with pain. His chest locked. He nearly blacked out on the spot. It felt as though someone had swung a great water-soaked beam through the air and brought it full across his shoulders and spine. Yet it was that same savage impact that knocked his fall half off line and kept him from plunging straight to the bottom in one unbroken drop.
The blow sent him rolling sideways down the slope. Rocks battered him. Dead branches lashed at his face. His robe filled with mud. Elbows and knees slammed one after another into sharp stone ridges until his teeth rattled and his head rang like struck metal.
At the edge of life and death, what thought had he to spare for anything else? His hands clawed wildly in every direction.
The first grasp found nothing at all but a handful of grass, roots and mud tearing loose together.
The second caught.
His palm closed around a wet cluster of vines.
They had grown for years out of a dark crack in the rock, but their outer skin was slick, their roots shallow. What chance had they against the full weight of a falling body? With a queer shriek, the whole tangle snapped taut, split apart, and began tearing strand by strand.
Yet in that brief moment—catch, strain, rip—his fall slowed again.
Between life and death, it is often not a whole thread one fights for, but half a thread; not a whole instant, but half an instant. And that half is sometimes all that stands between the living and the dead.
Before he could drag in so much as half a breath, he crashed into another clump of low, crooked trees.
Their branches were dense, tough, and springy. They whipped across his face, his hands, his neck, stinging as though dozens of fine lashes had struck him all at once. His robe snagged too, and with a sharp ripping sound nearly half the front was torn away.
But that pain, now, was mercy.
The trees were not tall, yet their branches crossed and tangled so thickly that they checked and dragged and hung him up on every side, bleeding still more force from his fall. Even so, the momentum in him had not yet run out. The instant he tore free of them, he struck something else lower down with a brutal crack—a shelf of stone jutting out from the cliff.
This blow was crueler than the tree.
His left shoulder had not recovered from the first impact. Now, hitting the sharp ridge again, he felt as though the breath in his chest had been smashed clean through him. Half his body dragged sideways across the stone. The surface scraped white beneath him. The torn front of his robe caught again on stone and old vine alike, and a great strip of blue cloth ripped free. At the same time his right ankle twisted violently among the loose rocks. The pain knifed upward so sharply that black sparks burst across his vision.
The vine he had caught before had still been stretched taut for one last instant, as though trying to hold him suspended. Then it snapped with a brittle crack, fibers turning pale as they sprang apart. He lost the last shred of purchase and slid on down along the slanted run of wet soil and loose grit beyond the stone shelf.
This time it was no longer a straight fall, but half slide, half tumble.
His body scraped down the rock face, shoulders and elbows and thighs burning where stone rasped skin away. Beside his ears came the constant hiss of pebbles skittering downward ahead of him. He did not know how far he slid before the light suddenly changed. He plunged through a darkness woven of jutting stone and matted vines, and then with a heavy thump he crashed into a hollow in the cliff face.
It was a half-slanted pocket of rock worn there by years of mountain wind and rain. Thick layers of damp leaf-rot and mud had gathered in it over time, and beneath them lay the remains of old dead branches. As Fang Yingjie fell into it, several brittle pieces broke beneath him with sharp little snaps. Then his chest locked. Something sweet rose in his throat. And the endless shriek of the wind that had filled his ears since the fall suddenly receded—
receded as though behind deep water.
In the instant before he lost consciousness, he thought he heard voices above.
They were far away, urgent, and strained, like something being torn by force out of the mountain wind.
It seemed—
someone was shouting his name.
But before that cry could become distinct, heaven and earth sank all at once, blackness surged up before his eyes, and all sound went out.
He had no idea how long he lay there.
When he woke, the first thing he saw was a line of pale gray daylight.
It was very narrow, squeezed to a thin slit by the black cliff walls on either side, as though someone had quietly cut a knife-mark through a night made of ink and let dawn leak in through the wound. The light was faint, but it told him two things at once.
The sky was still there.
And so was his life.
I'm still alive.
At first the thought rose lightly, almost delicately, like a bubble on cold water not yet burst. But the instant it surfaced, the pain in his body answered as if at a command.
His left shoulder woke first and worst. It felt as though a blunt rusty spike had been hammered into the seam of the bone. The slightest movement sent numbness across half his shoulder and back. His right knee ached heavily. His lower back felt as though it had been ground over and over beneath loose stone. And everywhere else—his palms, the backs of his hands, his elbows, the side of his face—every place where skin had been torn or bruised throbbed and burned, the drying wounds pulled tight by a night of cold wind.
Fang Yingjie knitted his brows. He did not dare sit up at once. Instead he slowly raised a hand and felt over himself.
His belly was all right.
His ribs hurt, but they did not seem broken.
He could still lift his right arm. The moment he tried to use the left, a bolt of pain stabbed through his shoulder so sharply that he sucked in breath and sweat sprang out along his temples.
He gritted his teeth and waited a while longer before bracing himself with his right hand and forcing his upper body upright an inch at a time.
Only then did he see where he was.
He had landed in a shallow hollow halfway down the cliff, or a little below it—a natural pocket worn into the rock. Above it, crooked branches and tangling vines screened it from view; before it, a jutting slab hid most of the opening; beneath him lay thick layers of rotted leaves and damp mud. The walls around it slanted inward on three sides, as though some mountain god, by sheer accident, had left a half-dead man one small breathing-place in the heart of a death-ground. More important still, the hollow did not lie directly under the cliff lip. It sat tucked behind a lower ridge of stone, hidden by jutting rock and hanging vines. From above, one would see only dark cliff-shadow and layered growth. It would be all but impossible to guess that a living person lay concealed here.
If he had not struck the tree first, torn free of the vine, crashed through the low brush, hung up for a moment on the stone shelf and the old roots, and finally slid along that cracked slope into this hidden pocket, he would by now have been shattered bone and torn flesh at the bottom—if even a whole body had remained.
The thought sent a chill down his spine.
The mountain air at dawn was already cold. This new cold came from inside. He felt a thin sheen of sweat break out between his shoulders.
Wind moved through the rock cracks carrying the damp, heavy chill of the ravine. Shrinking a little on instinct, he lowered his eyes to his feet—and paused.
The left shoe was still there.
The right was gone.
The sock was torn halfway open. His ankle was caked with mud and streaked with dried and fresh blood alike. The flesh around it had swelled high and ugly, blue-black already under the skin. It must have happened during the fall—when he had fought among the rocks and vines and finally wrenched free.
Then another thought came to him.
That shoe had most likely not come off halfway down.
Most likely it had flown from his foot at the very first instant—when the ground gave way and he stepped into empty air—and had been left somewhere near the top.
He stared at the bare foot for a long moment, and something inside him tightened very faintly.
If the shoe was still on the cliff above…
Then Senior Sister Xi, Senior Brother Zheng, Brother Xi, Instructor Fang—if they searched the edge—they would surely see it at once.
And if they saw the shoe, they would know where he had fallen.
But if they saw only the shoe, and not him…
Would they all think he was dead?
The thought spread coldly through his chest like an icy hand laid flat against it. He parted his lips as though to call out. But his throat was raw and dry, as though rubbed through with sand. The instant he tried to force sound through it, the pain tightened there again. In the end, only a thin, ragged breath slipped past his lips.
It was nothing.
So little that even the cliff walls seemed too indifferent to return it.
He sat without moving for a long time.
No one was in the mountains. No one in the ravine. The blades, cries, pursuit, and killing above the cliff the night before now seemed to belong to some other world entirely. Here there was only the low sound of wind moving through cracks in the rock and, somewhere beyond sight, the intermittent drip of water. The sound was thin, cold, and lonely, and the emptiness of the ravine deepened around it.
He made himself steady his breathing and reached inside his robe.
The moment his fingers touched the inner fold at his chest, they closed around a little cloth pouch.
His heart jumped.
He pulled it out and looked—and there it still was.
The outside was muddy now, and the mouth of the bag had been twisted half askew in the fall. But nothing seemed missing. The loose silver was still there. The pills were still there. So was the tinder tube.
And besides them—
two candied green plums, a little flattened.
The moment he saw them, his nose prickled sharply.
Feng Feiyun had tossed them to him, casual as anything, while leaning against a window before they left.
At the time he had caught them clumsily enough, annoyed even then at how the man could never seem to say three things without making a joke out of two of them. Yet here, at the bottom of a barren ravine between cold stone walls, what he had drawn from his robe first—and what had struck him deepest—was these two tiny plums.
He held one in his fingers and looked at it for a long time. In the end he could not bear to eat it yet. He put it back carefully, tied the pouch shut again, and tucked it against his chest.
Only then did he lower his head and examine his injuries properly.
The left shoulder had likely been injured first by the tree and then again by the lower stone shelf. The bone did not seem broken, but the sinews had clearly been badly shocked; the arm had little strength in it. Skin had been torn from his palms and the sides of his legs. There was a small cut at his temple too, the blood already caked into his hair. Worst of all was the right ankle. The swelling had puffed high and tight. The slightest turn sent sharp pain stabbing through it. He had most likely twisted it badly against the stone ridge before sliding farther down the crack.
None of it was light.
But neither was it yet so grave that he could not move at all.
He stared at the mud and dried blood across his knees for a long while. Then, suddenly, one of Feng Feiyun's old lines rose in his head:
What you people on Mount Hua learn is how to win. The first thing to learn below the mountain is how not to die.
Before, he had taken it for the mad monkey's usual crooked nonsense. He had let it pass in one ear and out the other. Only now, alone in this hollow below the cliff, shoulder ruined, ankle swollen, body caked in mud and blood, with only a narrow slit of sky above him, did he finally understand—
There are some words that sound light as air in ordinary times, like a joke one need not keep. Yet at the point where life hangs by a thread, they suddenly gain weight, and every word drives straight into the bone.
Fang Yingjie drew in a slow breath of cold air and forced himself to sit straighter.
He could not panic.
And he absolutely could not lie here waiting.
If he sprawled in this hollow for another half day, what came might not be help at all, but cold creeping into the bone, thirst, hunger, stiffening wounds, or some nameless thing from the mountain.
He had to get out.
He had to find water.
And first of all, he had to learn what kind of place this ravine truly was.
Following the Stream to Stay Alive
Bracing himself against the rock wall, he slowly dragged himself out of the hollow where rotten leaves and damp earth had broken his fall.
The moment he moved, the injuries that numbness had kept in check all woke at once. He had barely forced himself upright when the pain in his right ankle shot through him like a red-hot spike driven into the joint. His vision blackened. His chest clenched. He nearly pitched straight back into the hollow again.
He slammed his back against the stone wall and stood there, teeth gritted, not daring to move.
The rock was cold and damp. Through the torn cloth at his back the chill seeped in thread by thread. The wind in the ravine was not fierce. It curled and turned instead, winding through cracks in the stone, roots, and hanging vines. It did not slash like a blade. It lingered and clung, creeping through skin until it seemed to settle in the bone itself.
Fang Yingjie closed his eyes and fought down the wave of dizziness. When it finally eased a little, he shifted his weight bit by bit onto his left foot. The motion was slight. Even so, every little change twisted the injury in his right ankle, and sweat burst out along his brow until his lips had gone almost white.
At last he dared look around.
Outside the hollow there was a sloping field of loose stone.
It was not long, but it was steep and treacherous, covered with scattered rocks, mud, snapped branches, and torn vines—very likely much of the same debris he had brought down with him the night before. Several large blue-black rocks still showed fresh scrape marks and smears of mud. In places the grass roots had been ripped up and the soil split open, proof enough that something heavy had come crashing and dragging this way not long ago. Lower down, where stone met the foot of the mountain, a narrow runnel of water wound along the valley floor.
The stream was not large. It only slipped quietly through cracks between the rocks, something one might scarcely have noticed at all in ordinary country. But here, in the dead silence of the ravine, with no one about and only a strip of sky overhead, the thin thread of water seemed startlingly clear, like a narrow line of life opening in the middle of death.
The moment he heard it, his throat dried further.
Since the fall—through impact, shock, pain, and half-consciousness—his mouth had been growing drier and drier, until his tongue had begun to feel wooden. He had not really noticed it in the hollow. But now, at the sound of water, the thirst in him rose all at once from the bottom of his chest and throat until even breathing seemed to burn.
He did not let himself think too much. Holding first to stone, then to a leaning tree, he began picking his way down the slope.
It was a dangerous road even for an unhurt man.
Some of the rocks looked sound and slid out from under his foot the moment he touched them. Some were slimed with moss so dark it blended into the wet mud around them; step on them wrong, and they slipped like oil. In ordinary times Fang Yingjie knew a little of how to place a step and move lightly. He had learned the basics well enough. But now his left shoulder was hurt, his right foot half useless, and the breath in his chest would not gather as it ought. Whatever he knew, he could not use much of it.
So he did the only thing he could.
He felt first, stepped second, and only when he was sure of one foothold did he move to the next.
Twice loose stones slid under him and nearly sent him tumbling. Both times he saved himself only by grabbing at exposed roots. Even then the strain tugged at the injured shoulder and sent a burning pain through it, like a crack running from his shoulder down into his ribs.
By the time he reached the stream, a film of sweat had broken out all over him. It ran from his brow into the cut at his temple and stung there so sharply that he had to wipe it away with the back of his hand. When he looked, he saw mud and half-dried blood smeared there together. He could not even tell whether it was from the night before or from the last few moments.
The water in the stream was extraordinarily clear.
Clear enough that he could see the fine gravel, the little stones, the torn leaves on the bottom. Moss grew in dark green bands along the cracks in the stone, and the water only made the cold around them seem sharper. Before he even touched it, the chill of it was already rising from the surface in the smell of wet stone and mountain grass.
He crouched and scooped up one handful first, lifting it to his mouth.
The water was so cold it was almost bitter. It slid from tongue to throat like a line of thawing snow-water, shocking his whole body until his teeth clicked together. He stopped long enough to bear that first shock. Then he drank again, two or three mouthfuls in succession. Once the water had settled in his belly, the hollow tightness in his chest eased a little and his mind seemed to clear with it.
He crouched there for a while longer, then began tending to his injuries.
First his hands. Then his face. He washed away blood, mud, and sweat as best he could. Once his fingers were cleaner, he carefully peeled the shoe and sock away from his right foot.
Without them, the swelling looked worse than before. The outside of the ankle had swollen high and tight, blue shading toward purple. It was plain even to his inexpert eye that he had twisted it badly. The sight of it sank his heart a little. It was not a broken limb, perhaps—but if he used it carelessly now, it would only worsen the farther he went.
He drew in a breath and lowered the foot carefully into the stream.
The instant the cold closed over it, pain flared so savagely that every muscle in him locked at once. He bit down hard enough that his jaw hurt. But once the first stabbing fire had passed, the dull, swollen heat in the flesh did seem to recede a little under the mountain water, as though some of the trapped heat had been driven out.
He did not dare leave it there long. After a short while he lifted the foot again and set it on a stone by the bank.
Then he tore a comparatively clean strip from the inner layer of his robe, wrung it in water, and wound it firmly around the ankle. In the middle of doing so, he remembered the pouch again. He reached into his robe, found it, and pulled out two pills.
Thank heaven, they were still there.
His heart eased a little. He crushed them on a flat stone, mixed the powder with a little water into a rough paste, and spread it over the swelling before binding the cloth tight again. It was not a healer's work—only a desperate mountain remedy. But here in the ravine he had no elder to tend him, no companion to help him. If it dulled the pain, reduced the swelling, or bought him a little more use out of the foot, then for now it might be the difference between life and death.
Only after that did he let out a long breath and crouch by the water, letting the cold dampness rise against his face as he slowly regained himself.
As he did, the shape of the place around him finally began to come into focus.
This was very likely one of the stone gullies running below Eagle's Beak Ridge.
The cliff walls were high, but not sheer everywhere, and not closed all around. Old vines hung down from above. Crooked brush and scrub clung to cracks in the rock. In places there were even stunted trees growing almost sideways from the cliff face. During the rainy season, mountain torrents had likely come raging through here more than once. Looking along the stream, he could see that the valley floor broadened somewhat ahead. There were fewer great rocks. More trees. Through the tangle of brush and vine there seemed to be a little more open light somewhere farther on—not clear, but enough to suggest the ravine might not be a dead end after all.
He did not rise at once. He sat beside the stream looking a long while at the water.
To climb back to the cliff top from where he now was, in his present condition, was a dream fit only for a fool. Setting aside the ruined ankle, the injured shoulder alone would make climbing vines or rock impossible for long. And Eagle's Beak Ridge was not the kind of place where one simply felt one's way back upward. He had fallen in the dark. He did not know from exactly which section of cliff. He did not know what might bear weight above. To attempt the ascent blindly would most likely mean only another fall.
But if he followed the water down…
Where there is living water in the mountains, there is often a road of some kind. If not a village, then at least a way out of the closed ravine.
In mountain travel, the most frightening thing is not difficult ground. It is having no way forward at all. Nor is an injury the worst thing. The worst thing is being trapped in one place, sitting still until strength runs out.
Now that he had found water running forward, that was already better than dying here beneath the cliff.
With that thought, he slowly braced himself on the stone and pushed himself upright again. Something in his gaze grew steadier with the decision.
He could not go up.
So he would go down.
Once the choice was made, his mind eased a little. The panic, the emptiness, the formless pressure that had sat on his chest since he woke beneath the cliff all retreated by a degree. Leaning on the rock wall, he began limping along the stream.
He could not go fast.
He could barely go steadily.
But he was moving forward.
The valley held no human sound, only running water, wind through the treetops, and now and then the sudden burst of mountain birds lifting from the undergrowth. Against that silence his own uneven footsteps sounded thin and dull over the wet stones and mud.
Every so often he had to stop and rest, leaning on rock or tree while his chest settled again.
The left shoulder dragged heavily. The slightest lift of the arm pulled pain through the ribs. The right ankle swelled more and more with every step. Bound tightly under the cloth, pressed against the inside of the shoe, it felt as though something blunt and hard were grinding there a little deeper every time he put weight on it. Sweat kept coming in waves. Then the wind chilled it on his back.
Even so, he did not dare stop long.
At a time like this, the most dangerous thing was not pain, but letting the self loosen. Sit too long, and the force holding you upright leaks away. Let the warmth go, and the cold enters through wet cloth, through wounds, through the joints. After that, even standing again becomes uncertain.
So he bit down and kept going one stretch at a time.
As he went, Feng Feiyun came back to mind.
The man's mouth had never rested. One line after another, east, west, all nonsense at the time. Yet now, at the bottom of this ravine, Fang Yingjie realized how many of those lines could actually keep a man alive. Read the terrain first. Enter a strange place by first finding the road out. Steady the mind before anything else. They had sounded crude to him before, almost insulting in their simplicity. Now every one of them proved useful.
Warmth stirred faintly in his chest at the thought—part gratitude, part the shock of recognizing too late how much weight had been hidden in those easy, offhand words.
Once he had thought the martial world was all swords and names, grudges and honor, victory and defeat. Only now did he understand that first, before all of those, comes one word:
to live.
Only if you live is there a road ahead.
Only if you live can you speak at all of the people, the debts, and the truths and falsehoods still tangled behind you.
Thinking this, he raised his eyes slowly and looked toward the stream winding deeper ahead.
The valley road was still deep. The shadows beneath the trees were still thick.
He touched the pouch inside his robe, broke off a sturdy dead branch to use as a staff, and once more, bracing himself against stone, took another step.
A Ruined Hall by Chance
He followed the stream downward for nearly half a day.
At first the valley floor was narrow, the rocks broken and uneven, and the sound of the water struck back and forth between the cliff walls until it seemed to throb inside the stone itself. Fang Yingjie was hurt and could not go fast. He had to lean on the branch and pick his way slowly from one slick rock to the next. Every step tugged at his ankle and at the ache beneath his ribs. The slightest real exertion sent a deeper pain spearing upward and sweat breaking out along his brow.
Later the valley bent, and the ground gradually opened a little. The stream emerged from among the rocks. The current smoothed. The walls ceased to close in like hacked stone on either side. When he looked up, he could even see a narrow thread of light falling slantwise between the mountains above. It was not much. Yet here, in this cold and shadowed cleft, it felt like proof that heaven had not quite turned its face away from him.
But even as the road improved, his body was nearing its limit.
Since the fall he had never truly regained a full breath. First the crash into the ravine, then the struggle to assess the injuries, to find water, to wash, to bind the wounds, and then the long downward walk along the stream—he had never once really stopped. While the sun still stood higher, the water and movement had kept him going. By the time the sun had begun to slope westward and the mountain shadows started closing again, the weakness from pain, hunger, cold, and exhaustion rose in earnest. It climbed out of his limbs and belly like chill smoke.
He went a little, then rested a little.
At times he leaned against rock and fought for breath. At times he stood with his eyes shut against a tree trunk until the heaviness in his chest eased enough for him to move again. But eventually even the act of breathing began to feel oddly far away. His legs seemed weighted with iron. Lifting the foot was hard. Setting it down was hard. It felt as though every extra step shaved away another little piece of what strength he had left.
Near sunset, as he came around a slope tangled thick with brush, he suddenly caught sight of a broken roof-corner among the weeds and drifting mist along the valley side.
It lay half hidden behind several old trees, wrapped in vines, no more at first glance than a gray ruin collapsing into the hillside. Had he not looked twice, he might have taken it for a half-fallen stone shed or some weather-broken lean-to. He was already dizzy with weariness and thought for an instant he might be seeing wrong. But when he steadied himself and limped nearer, he saw that it was real.
And it was no hunter's shack.
Nor some village shelter thrown up against the rain.
It was a true hall of some kind.
If one called it a temple, it was unlike any temple he knew.
It was not large—almost rather small—but its layout was perfectly proper. There were broken steps in front. A main hall behind. On either side, one could still trace the remains of side chambers or galleries, though most had collapsed into rubble and wild growth. The ridge of the roof had broken in one place. Tiles lay shattered. One corner of the eaves had fallen away altogether. Wind came through the gaps with a low, hollow moan that only deepened the desolation of it. Yet because so much had been destroyed, the old structure beneath showed even more clearly. The remaining eaves, though broken, still had a fierce lift to them. The foundation platform, though old, still held its line and dignity. It was as though this place, though never grand in size, had once possessed a hard, austere majesty that refused to stoop to the ordinary. Even ruined to this degree, it still carried itself unlike any little roadside shrine where country people might come to burn incense and make petitions.
Fang Yingjie was by now aching in every bone and half blind with fatigue. Whatever strange feeling the place carried, it still promised one thing the open slope could not:
shelter from the wind.
So he braced himself on the ruined doorway and went in slowly.
The hall doors were all but gone.
One leaf had disappeared entirely. The other hung crooked from the frame, blackened and split. The moment he pushed it, it gave a long complaining creak and let fall a sheet of ancient dust. The sound carried through the empty hall with startling force.
Inside was colder than outside.
Not the cold of open mountain wind, but a deeper chill sunk into old brick, rotted beams, and long-dead earth—as though the breath of the place itself had gone stale years ago and never returned. Dusk leaked in through the broken eaves and the split window frames, leaving the interior dim and gray. The floor was littered with broken tiles, fallen wood, dead leaves, and thick dust. In one corner lay half a roof-beam that must have come down years before. The air smelled of old dirt, damp wood, and long-shut decay. Breathe it too deeply, and even the chest felt heavy.
And yet the moment he stepped inside, his mind steadied a little.
At least it could block the wind.
He stood inside the ruined doorway and let his eyes adjust to the failing light.
The middle of the main hall opened broad and empty. Though the floor lay under years of dust, one could still see where something had once stood there—an altar table perhaps, incense vessels, maybe even the main seat at the back. All of that was gone now. Only faint impressions remained, like the pressure of former years still lying over the floor.
But what made him pause were not the empty central spaces.
It was the four corners.
In each corner of the hall stood one enormous broken stone image.
The eastern one caught the eye first. Much of it had crumbled away, yet at the crown of the head one could still make out something like horns, and the long body still coiled with scale-ridges rising down the spine. The claws dug into the stone base. The head lifted upward as if about to ascend. At first glance it looked like a dragon. Look closer, and it was older, rougher, far more severe than the cheerful, cloud-wreathed dragons carved in ordinary temples.
The southern one had lost half a wing, and the stone of its trailing tail had weathered so badly that the details were nearly gone. Yet the posture remained—neck thrown up, head turned back, as if caught forever on the verge of flight. Even broken and still, it seemed to hold something of a phoenix's spirit in it.
The western statue was the most ruined. Most of the face had been lost entirely. Only the broad outline remained—head raised, forelegs planted. The spine arched high. The chest was heavy and powerful. It was not lion, not tiger, but some stranger beast. Fallen stone lay heaped at its feet where parts of its base and the surrounding carving had collapsed away. In ruin it looked all the more grim.
The northern image, however, was the strangest of all.
The lower body was squat and powerful like a tortoise, crouched low and unmoving, its back as broad as armor. Yet around it wound the remains of another shape, long and coiling upward—serpent, yet not quite serpent, bound around the tortoise in one ancient form. It looked nothing like the ordinary gods of folk shrines. Rather it carried the remote, archaic weight of something far older and more forbidding.
Fang Yingjie could not help staring.
He had grown up on Mount Hua. The things he had seen and heard all his life were sect rules, Daoist halls, and the teachings of elders. As for the various shrines, temples, and local cult places below the mountain, he knew almost nothing. This place plainly had steps, hall, altar-space, and an older pattern of worship. Yet the four corner images were unlike any gods or buddhas he knew.
If this was a temple, what had it worshipped?
And if it was not, why did it have so proper a hall at all?
He kept his gaze on the broken images and felt that strange unease in him deepen. It was not only the gloom. Not only the desolation. Rather it felt as though this tiny ruined hall still held down some fragment of an order long since broken. The place had fallen, decayed, been left to wilderness—but some old severity still lingered in the dust and stone, unburied and unyielding.
But he was too hurt and tired now to spare much more thought for it.
Outside, the last line of daylight finally went under.
Once night settled into the ravine, the stillness outside deepened almost at once. Far away there was only the stream striking stone. Nearby, the wind passing through broken eaves and split lattice gave out a low, mournful sound. In the hall Fang Yingjie searched a little and finally found a place in one rear corner where part of a fallen beam still stood half upright and blocked most of the draught. The floor was damp and cold there too, but at least it was a place a man could sit.
He lowered himself carefully against the wall and felt at once as though every bone in him had come loose.
After resting a little, he still forced himself to gather a few comparatively dry splinters and old boards from nearby. He piled them together and took out his tinder tube.
The spark took twice, then failed. Took again, flared a little, then died.
The whole hall was too wet. Most of the wood too rotten. After several tries he managed only a tiny, unsteady flame no larger than a bean. It flickered and threw the broken wall and the giant corner-statues into a wavering half-light that made the place seem more ominous than before.
Fearing to waste the rest of the tinder entirely, he stopped.
The hall sank back into shadow.
Leaning there against the wall, he reached into his robe and after a little searching drew out one of the candied green plums.
He put it into his mouth and held it there slowly. The flesh had softened from the syrup. A little sour, a little sweet. As it melted on his tongue, something in his chest tightened strangely and the bridge of his nose prickled.
It was only a common candied plum.
But when a man is hurt, half-starved, and freezing, the sudden taste of something sweet and human in the mouth becomes something else entirely. It was as though only now, after fighting his way up from the bottom of the cliff and into this ruined hall, did he truly feel he was still alive.
And only now did he feel how completely he was alive alone.
His belly was still empty. His limbs still hurt. Outside, wind moved through the ravine and made the broken eaves moan. The cold kept creeping into his bones. Yet it was this single plum that suddenly made one thing very clear to him, and heavy beyond bearing:
In other people's eyes, he was most likely now only the one who fell.
They might still be searching above. They might still be in confusion. Or they might already be starting to believe there was no point—that he had surely died. Given another night, another half day, even the thought living, find the man; dead, find the body might begin to thin and fade. The sky was too vast. The mountains too deep. Here, where he had fallen, it was as though heaven, earth, and the human world had all shut him out together.
If no one knew he was still alive—
then he would have to stay alive first by his own hand.
Fang Yingjie hugged his knees and leaned into the icy wall, swallowing the last of the plum's sour-sweetness. It did not fill the belly. It did not heal a single wound. Yet it let some of the wildness inside him settle a little.
But a body can only be driven so far.
Pain, hunger, cold, exhaustion—he had been holding them all down by force. Now, at last in a place where the wind was less savage, all of them rose together. His eyelids grew heavier and heavier until they felt loaded with stone. The stream outside, the wind, the small creaks of old wood all seemed suddenly far away, then near again, then far.
The last thing he saw before sleep took him was still the four enormous broken images standing half-buried in darkness.
Temple-like, and not a temple.
Small in scale, yet laid out with grave precision.
Ruined almost beyond recognition, and yet the more ruined it was, the clearer it seemed that the place must once have mattered; the more abandoned, the more it suggested that something not ordinary had once stood here.
Then even that passed from him. His head tipped sideways against the cold wall, and at last he slept.
The Sacred Assembly by Night
He had no idea how long he slept before voices and lamplight woke him again.
First came footsteps.
Then the rustle of sleeves moving in air.
And then one lamp after another shone in from outside the hall, relighting the dead black ruin layer by layer.
Fang Yingjie's heart jumped violently. He woke almost all at once. Instinct drove him farther back into the deepest corner, pressing himself into the shadow behind the half-collapsed timber and the wall. Even his breathing he forced down to almost nothing.
Three separate groups entered in succession and took their places, each as if according to some old rule.
White-robed figures to the west.
Red-robed to the south.
Blue-robed to the east.
Only the northern place still stood empty.
The white-robed group entered first.
They were the most numerous, and the most orderly of step. More than a dozen white-robed disciples came in and spread out by ranks, men and women both, all in tightly belted white fighting dress. Their garments were not the plain rough white of common mourning-cloth, but formal-cut uniforms edged at collar, cuff, and sash with faint cold-silver cloud-horn patterns. Under the lamplight the whole western side of the hall became a field of stern white, and with it came an immediate sense of severe discipline.
At their head walked a man in his forties, long of build and heavy in carriage, with a face that needed no effort to command. He did not pose. He did not raise his voice. Yet the instant he entered, it felt as though the whole ruined hall had become smaller under him.
It was none other than Qi Jianfeng, Cult Leader of the Sacred Unicorn Cult.
His own white robe differed sharply from those of the disciples behind him. Across shoulder and breast, the dim yet unmistakable pattern of a unicorn lay worked into the cloth—older, weightier, more ancient in feeling than anything decorative. In the shifting lamplight it seemed almost to stir.
At his side stood a young man in his early twenties, also robed in white, broad-shouldered and keen-eyed, with arrogance and edge still only half concealed in him. This was Qi Zhenyue, young lord of the Sacred Unicorn Cult. The unicorn worked into his robe was sharper, fiercer, more openly aggressive than his father's—exactly the pattern one might expect of youth not yet taught to fully sheath its own point.
Behind them came two other high-ranking figures in white, one to either side. To the left, a thin, gaunt man in his fifties whose gaze was cold as sealed ice—Helian Chi, the Left Protector Elder. To the right, a woman in white, pale-faced and grave, standing in silence and radiating chill—Bai Suling, the Right Protector Elder. Behind them came a hard-backed, sharp-eyed white-robed man, Xue Wuli, Master of the Eastern Branch Hall. None of these three wore the full unicorn pattern. Instead, their robes bore only the proper distinctions of rank: beast-horn borders, cold-cloud tracery, dark lines of authority without transgressing the Qi family's place.
The instant they entered, they took the western half of the hall. Fifteen white-robed disciples spread behind them in measured order, front and back, high and low, already forming a hard and disciplined force. On the surface they had come to an old assembly. But from this display alone, it was plain the Sacred Unicorn Cult had not come empty-handed.
The red-robed party arrived next.
Their numbers were fewer, and the light around them sharper, more flickering. At their head came two young women, one before the other, both dressed in crimson martial robes cut in a palace style.
The first was younger, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Her beauty struck at once, bright and unmistakable, yet in her brows and eyes there was also a fierce, unbending edge. Even here, before broken stone and ancient ruin, she seemed to carry her own light with her. The moment Fang Yingjie saw her, something in him jerked. She was beautiful—yes—but also sharpened, quick, and impossible to bend.
This was Feng Hong, Palace Master of the Phoenix Dance Palace.
Across her robe the phoenix pattern shone clear, gold and scarlet interwoven at shoulder and breast, as if a living bird of fire had curved its neck and gathered itself there. Even in the full hall of lights, it held its own against every other color present.
Behind her came a woman a few years older, twenty-three or so, with features bearing some likeness to Feng Hong's but steadier, cooler, more controlled. This was Feng Zhu, born of the inner Feng family line and elder sister to Feng Hong.
Her red robe was likewise not the ordinary dress of a disciple. The phoenix pattern on it was more restrained, more severe, less radiant than Feng Hong's, but all the more unmistakably of the palace's direct bloodline.
Behind them came a middle-aged woman in crimson, perhaps in her forties, grave of face and measured in step. She did not seize the front, yet carried the authority of one long used to command. This was Feng Jiuyi of the Feather Guard Division of Phoenix Dance Palace. Her robe bore no phoenix, only layered feather- and fire-patterns along the sleeve and hem—rich, yet never improper. Six red-robed disciples followed her, men and women both, all young. None of them wore the phoenix itself, only the proper feathered trim of the palace. Their numbers were fewer, yet once they took the southern side of the hall, they yielded nothing in presence.
Feng Hong stood in front. Feng Zhu and Feng Jiuyi held left and right behind her. Together they looked like a living flame with three hidden edges inside it.
Last came the blue-robed line.
They were the fewest of all, only a handful.
The one at their head was a young man of nineteen or twenty. The moment he entered, the air in the hall shifted again. Across the blue of his robe the dragon pattern slanted from shoulder downward, flowing into the cloud-and-water lines worked into the cloth. He was broad-backed, open-browed, and there was in him a boldness and straightness uncommon in one so young—as if sea wind and open water traveled with him wherever he went. He was the sort of man who, even in the middle of a deadly tangle, would not easily yield half a step.
This was Long Tianxiao, young lord of Azure Dragon Isle.
Behind him came an older man in blue, in his fifties, grave and deep of gaze. He carried no trace of swagger. Yet what came from him was the depth of a mountain standing over deep water. This was Long Boyuan, the elder responsible for transmitting the isle's martial teachings. Though he too bore the Long surname, his robe did not carry the dragon itself. Instead there were only the wave-lines and scale-edgings proper to a senior elder of the isle, clearly distinct from the bloodline of its ruling house.
Two other young blue-robed disciples followed, both men, each sharp and unafraid. Like the others, their robes bore only wave and fine-scale borders, never the dragon itself.
They took the eastern side of the hall.
And the north remained empty.
One lamp after another had been lit by now, and in that full firelight Fang Yingjie could at last see the four great broken images more clearly.
To the east was indeed the Dragon.
To the south, the Phoenix.
To the west, the beast with horn and hoof was unmistakably the Unicorn.
And to the north, where tortoise and serpent had been wound together, his earlier impression had not been mistaken.
This ruined hall was no common temple.
It was some old place of rule and lineage, laid out with ancient order.
Yet none of those entering had eyes to spare for the statues.
Because the tension in the hall had already drawn tight.
The first to speak was Qi Jianfeng.
He did not step to the center. He did not take a high position. He merely stood before the western seats and let his gaze pass over Feng Hong, Feng Zhu, Feng Jiuyi, Long Tianxiao, and Long Boyuan, then spoke in a voice steady and unhurried.
"This sacred assembly has lain abandoned for many years. We do not reopen it tonight to speak of old fellowship.
"If old fellowship truly still lived, this place would not have fallen to ruin as it has."
The words were spoken flatly. Even so, they tightened the heart.
Feng Hong stood before the southern seats, gaze cold as iron. She offered not even a courtesy phrase.
"If it is not for old fellowship," she said, "then speak plainly."
Qi Jianfeng did not seem offended. He only gave the faintest smile.
"Good.
"Then I will speak plainly."
At that he let his gaze rest first on Feng Hong, then on Long Tianxiao, and finally on the four old statues looming dimly over the hall.
"The old covenant has pressed upon the Four Gates for centuries.
"The Azure Dragon barred from the Central Plains. The Phoenix line left to female rule alone. The Unicorn line never allowed to fully unfold. The Black Tortoise shut in behind its own doors.
"One name in theory. In truth, a scattered remnant.
"If we go on guarding the old covenant this way, then in the end what vanishes will not be the covenant alone—but the very root of Tianmen."
Long Tianxiao's brows lifted slightly.
Feng Zhu did not move. But a colder line entered Feng Jiuyi's gaze. Feng Hong, however, gave a short, derisive laugh.
"And therefore?"
Qi Jianfeng's voice remained even.
"Therefore the Four Gates must establish their order again.
"Not each keeping the old covenant and waiting to die, but using this age of disorder to restore the old order of Tianmen."
At last he laid the first hidden card openly on the table.
"My meaning is simple: the Four Gates should no longer remain a loose alliance. One gate must stand at the center and hold the rest. The old covenant should become a true order, one able to command in all directions.
"The Sacred Unicorn Cult can provide the men, the force, the stores, and the martial foundation needed to restore the form of the Sacred Tianmen Sect."
The hall went silent at once.
Not for long.
But heavily.
Because what he called "restoring Tianmen" meant, plainly enough, putting the Sacred Unicorn Cult above the other gates under the name of revival.
Long Tianxiao laughed first.
There was no warmth in the sound.
"A fine way to say it," he said. "You call it restoring the Four Gates. What you really mean is that the rest of us should raise you up as Lord of Tianmen."
Qi Zhenyue's face changed instantly, and he stepped forward half a pace, the fire in him no longer quite held down. But before Qi Jianfeng could even lift a hand, Helian Chi's gaze had already turned warningly sideways, and Xue Wuli's lips had curved in a cold half-smile, as though waiting to see who would be the first to tear the last veil away. Qi Jianfeng himself merely stopped his son and kept his gaze on Long Tianxiao.
"If that is all the young lord hears," he said, "then his vision is too narrow."
Feng Hong spoke again, harder than Long Tianxiao had.
"I don't think his vision is narrow at all.
"If you want new rules, say so. But the moment you say 'one gate shall hold the rest,' this ceases to be a four-gate alliance. Better simply call it what it is—let the Sacred Unicorn Cult swallow Azure Dragon Isle and Phoenix Dance Palace whole."
She said it with brutal directness, leaving not an inch of face.
Several white-robed disciples stiffened at once. On the red side too, hands shifted subtly nearer weapons. Bai Suling still stood silent at Qi Jianfeng's rear right, but her cold gaze had already found Feng Jiuyi's and met it midair like two invisible blades striking together.
Qi Jianfeng, however, seemed to have expected exactly this.
"If it were only empty talk of command," he said, "then naturally Palace Master Feng would not accept it.
"That is why a tighter bond is needed."
And then he laid out the second card.
"My son Zhenyue will marry Palace Master Feng.
"First, by wedding, the southern and western lines may be steadied together.
"Second, if the Phoenix and Unicorn become one house, then restoring Tianmen's old order will no longer be mere words.
"And third—once the strength of the Azure Dragon and the Black Tortoise are brought in after that—the restoration of the Sacred Tianmen Sect will no longer be fantasy."
The words fell, and the air in the hall tightened even further.
Fang Yingjie, hidden in the darkest corner, did not understand every thread of what was being woven before him. But he understood enough to feel that this was no ordinary reunion. They were trying to cast men and gates alike into one great net.
Feng Hong froze for only an instant.
Then her face turned glacial.
"You are dreaming."
Three words.
Bright, hard, clear.
The whole hall seemed to jump beneath them.
Qi Zhenyue's expression darkened at once. He stepped forward.
"Feng Hong—"
She cut him off like a blade.
"Do not call my name.
"The affairs of Phoenix Dance Palace are not for the Sacred Unicorn Cult to decide."
Feng Zhu now stepped forward as well and came to stand beside her.
"Phoenix Dance Palace does not accept this marriage proposal," she said flatly.
Feng Jiuyi too shifted one sleeve and came to stand half a step behind the two sisters. She did not rush to the front. Yet that very position made it plain she was now guarding them both. She said not a word, but her meaning was unmistakable.
Long Tianxiao, who until then had watched with arms of ice folded inside his eyes, finally let the first visible spark of anger show.
"If Phoenix Dance Palace rejects it, Azure Dragon Isle will not sit here and watch.
"If you want to discuss matters, discuss them. But if you mean to use the name of a sacred assembly to force marriage, force gates, and force the Four Gates to bow, then Azure Dragon Isle has wasted its journey."
At last a line of real cold crossed Qi Jianfeng's eyes.
"Are you speaking for Phoenix Dance Palace," he asked, "or for yourself?"
Long Tianxiao gave a cold smile.
"Whom I speak for is not your concern."
Before the echo of the sentence had faded, Long Boyuan behind him had already raised his eyes. He said nothing. Yet the weight of that single look set the position of Azure Dragon Isle's older generation there as clearly as words could have. Long Tianxiao had spoken, and the elder behind him would not leave him to face the front alone.
With that, the whole hall entered the state that lies just before a break.
More important still—
the northern place was still empty.
The side that ought to have been occupied remained without a single figure.
Fang Yingjie drew farther into shadow and forced even his breath quieter.
He was still hurt. His mind was still half dulled by fatigue and pain. Yet what he saw before him could not have been more real—ruined hall, ancient statues, white robes, red robes, blue robes, marriage alliance, the bid to bring the Four Gates under one order, and all of it now on the edge of explosion.
And of everyone present in that hall, not one had yet noticed that in the darkest corner there crouched a boy who had climbed in alive from the bottom of a cliff.
The air held so tight it seemed one could hear it stretch.
The white-robed disciples were already pressing subtly forward.
On the red and blue sides there was not a trace of yielding left.
Qi Zhenyue's gaze cut like a knife toward Long Tianxiao and Feng Hong. Feng Hong stood perfectly straight, fear not visible in her at all. Long Tianxiao had already shifted half his body, as though the instant the thing broke he would be first into the front line.
Helian Chi and Xue Wuli stood like two iron pegs behind Qi Jianfeng. Bai Suling remained motionless, robes hanging still, and somehow that made the cold around her more threatening. Feng Jiuyi guarded Feng Hong and Feng Zhu with the red-robed disciples held taut behind her. Long Boyuan stood behind Long Tianxiao, silent and mountain-heavy, and for that very reason all the more difficult to take lightly.
And Qi Jianfeng, before the western seats, still did not move.
It was that lack of movement which made the pressure in the whole ruined hall come tightest of all.
The four broken statues looked down in silence from their corners.
The northern place still hung empty.
The Black Tortoise had not come.
And inside the old hall, only half a thread more was needed before the true clash would burst open at last.
Poetic Coda
Below the broken cliff, one failing life clung fast through mud and stone;
By the stream he learned how cold the roads below the mountain run.
A ruined hall stood waiting where no temple ought to stand;
Four ancient beasts in shadow kept the shape of an older world.
White robes came first and spoke of marriage, rule, and a restored old order;
Red and blue answered hard, and before a single blade was drawn,
the fire in that dead hall had already reached the edge of breaking.
(End of Chapter Sixteen)