The Xuanyin Mountains’ spiritual energy drained away year by year, and gradually, Flying Jade Peak ceased to be so cold. In recent years, mundane grass and flowers had begun to sprout sparsely around the little cottage in high summer, and on sunny afternoons, you could do without lighting the heater. Listless auspicious animals filled the area near the immortal palace at the mountain’s summit—yes, Flying Jade Peak’s immortal palace had once again seen the light of day.

Exploiting the perks of his position, Xi Ping had called up a bunch of meticulous Luwu to take a cable car up the mountain, bringing abacuses and ledgers. Only after working around the clock for the better part of half a year did they manage to dig out Flying Jade Peak’s immortal palace, which had been sealed for centuries.

But the inhabitants of Flying Jade Peak were too few. Even if they invited all their neighbors to make up the numbers, it still wouldn’t be enough to fill the enormous immortal palace. Therefore, teacher and disciples still lived in the little cottage and only used the immortal palace when they needed to keep up appearances.

The cottage had been expanded somewhat. The first floor was where General Zhi usually received visitors. There was a large clock hanging there. A karma beast avatar dwelt year round in the clock.

Perhaps because Zhi Xiu had brought it back to the Xuanyin Mountains, and perhaps because it had seen the shade of its former master in this new master of Xuanyin, the karma beast was a little dependent on him. It was always hanging around Flying Jade Peak. So Zhi Xiu had simply set it to watch the door and announce visitors.

The clock had been made by Lin Chi himself. It had been the first purely mechanical product of Moon Plated Peak after spiritual energy had been prohibited. The clock face was an entire zhang square, round on the outside and square on the inside, with a night half and a day half. Apart from the twelve shichen and ninety-six ke, there was also a “character hand” as tall as a person. Each shichen contained twenty-four characters, matching the twenty-four solar terms, so when the big clock ticked off a character, a mythical beast representing the solar term would jump out on the clock face and run around the dial. When it had run around twenty-four times, it would have come to the next character.

The karma beast loved it. It was always gamboling after the mythical beasts, full of delight. Outside of Zhi Xiu and Heaven’s Design Pavilion, Lin Chi became the third person it liked.

But now, Zhi Xiu had said that an important guest might come to visit, and having a single karma beast watching the door might not be respectful enough, so he had also set a Xi Ping to watch it.

They waited and waited, and the “important guest” didn’t come. Xi Ping spent two days exchanging hateful looks with the karma beast and got fed up with it. “So who is it? Such airs. If they don’t come soon, I’m not waiting any longer.”

“All right, then stop wasting time here,” Zhi Xiu said, “pick up a sword and come out back with me…”

Before he could finish his sentence, his accomplished disciple sat right back down. “I’m waiting for the guest.”

Zhi Xiu: “…”

“Hey, shifu,” said Xi Ping, “I’m going to your wine cellar to get a jar of wine-steeped plums to eat!”

Other people drank wine that had been cooked with plums; he particularly liked plums that had been steeped in boiling wine. He mixed them with honey to eat them. Decades-old mellow wine, and he would drink a couple mouthfuls at most and boil the rest away, never mind how wasteful it was.

Zhi Xiu went out holding his sword. “You can’t have it. It’s an insult to the wine.”

Xi Ping was selectively deaf. “Thanks, shifu!”

He got out an old manuscript of Zhang Jue’s, followed its directions to perform a divination, picked out a jar according to the results of the divination, expectantly broke off the sealing clay, sniffed. A failure.

Shizu was no good; his divinations were inaccurate. Shizun was also no good; the wine he made was as bland as water.

“Fortunately, I am filial and not picky.”

Xi Ping returned with the wine jar. First he teased the karma beast until steam was coming out of its ears. Then he idly got out a novel about Chu’s Emperor Yu Chang and read while he cooked plums.

The novel was a little hackneyed. It told a story of Chu’s Emperor Yu Chang remaining completely unmoved among a crowd of beauties (suspected of being impotent), loving only a young palace maid of unremarkable appearance.

He had once bought a book called Romantic Tales—Chu Emperor Anthology; all the stories in it were this sort of thing, the unshakeable red-eyed Yu Chang falling head over heels in love with a series of palace maids, eunuchs, female petty officials, carpenters, seamstresses, flower-sellers…and so on—and being summarily rejected.

At first, Xi Ping had read with keen pleasure, a peculiar smile on his face. Later he had read too much of it and memorized all the plot devices. He thought it ought to have been called Demeaning Anecdotes—Blindness Anthology.

As he read, he began to yawn repeatedly from boredom. His head, propped on his hand, began to nod.

The aroma of the plum wine entered his dreams in a daze, enchanting and dissipated. This smell took him back to the old Jinping of his youth.

He dimly heard the sounds of string and woodwind on the shore of the Lingyang River. The tune was very familiar, only distant, fading in and out.

Xi Ping followed the sound, struggling to listen closely and distinguish the old tune. Just as he was satisfied, he heard a bang—a huge monster suddenly turned up in the river in his dream. A hideous human head flew out of the water and opened its mouth to roar: “Zhi Jingzhai, I challenge you!”

Xi Ping’s dream, runny as the water of the Lingyang River, was shaken to bits by this cry. He nearly fell out of his reclining chair. The karma beast running around the big clock also ran headfirst into the character hand.

The startled man and beast, fur bristling, exchanged a brief look of dismay. Xi Ping gave an ah and came back to himself. Pained, he rubbed the center of his brow. “Oh, it’s her. I was wondering why I was being made to receive the guest.”

There was no need to receive a frequent guest—for example, their “good neighbor” who came to visit every day; the karma beast could just call for them.

For guests from outside, it was usually Xi Yue receiving them. After all, General Zhi had some care for his reputation, and sometimes he was worried about outsiders getting a strange impression of Flying Jade Peak.

Only when Wu Lingxiao of Northern Li’s Kunlun came would Zhi Xiu half-purposefully make Xi Yue stay away. Right now, he had sent Xi Yue to Jinping’s Heaven’s Design Pavilion to run errands for a few days.

Wu Lingxiao… She was a difficult person to appraise.

There were some people who had perhaps come out of the womb with a murderous aura.

After the life-and-death battle in the Land of Turmoil, Wu Lingxiao, whether she was compelled by the spiritual energy prohibition situation or had really come around, had accepted spirit-conducting metal…and accepted it a little too much.

At first, just so she could move as a half-puppet, she had made about the same adjustments on Moon Plated Peak as Xi Yue. After getting used to that, ignoring all of Moon Plated Peak’s attempts to dissuade her, she had insisted on having upgraded immortal tools attached to her body.

The spiritual energy prohibition had just begun then, everything was in an exploratory phase, and half-puppet techniques were evil arts, strange to an orthodox sect. Lin Chi told her to give him at least a year, and only then would he dare to try out the safest upgraded immortal tool. Until then, he didn’t dare to rashly operate on a human body.

Wu Lingxiao found even looking at him to cost an effort. She waved a hand. “Fine, go have your baby, I’ll think of a way myself.”

Next, an amateur being more dangerous than an expert, this madwoman ready to stake everything on one throw, having a general grasp of spirit-conducting gold, attached an upgraded immortal tool to herself.

Inevitably, she failed the first time and blew a manmade lake into Moon Plated Peak. Fortunately, though spiritual energy had just been prohibited, she still had her cultivation level; a shed skin body wouldn’t die so easily.

This attempt at getting herself killed was too outstanding; even Xi Ping was amazed. He deliberately ran to get Xi Yue and tell him the outcome of altering a puppet on one’s own authority. After this, it took Wu Lingxiao half a year and the help of a crowd of spirit-conducting gold experts working themselves into a frenzy to put herself together. Moon Plated Peak breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that she ought to calm down now.

The upshot was that before the venerable old lady could warm up her arms and legs, she went and did it again.

This time, she got very lucky and didn’t blow herself into a heap of spare parts. She was fortunate enough to acquire an arm that could hold up a cauldron. Afterward, Lin Chi reviewed the whole process in trepidation and found that she had nearly answered the call of the Sword Ancestor. While putting what he had learned in order, he advised fearfully, “Duchess, it was by a pure lucky fluke that you were unharmed this time. In the future, you must not act rashly again!”

“None of your damn business,” said Wu Lingxiao.

Before Lin Chi could sort out his ideas, she took Wanshuang and left without saying goodbye, returning alone to Northern Li.

At the time, Northern Li’s Kunlun was a headless dragon, and there was fierce internal strife in Yanning—precisely the moment when there was a mountain with no tiger. Just as ambitious people on all sides were raising armies, itching to act, the god of death descended from above.

She seized the Sect Leader’s Seal. Relying on an arm with an upgraded immortal tool attached to it and Wanshuang, she took control of the Kunlun Mountains. Then, without another word, she went straight toward Yanning, shut the city gates, and washed the imperial capital in blood. It was said that that night, Wanshuang’s fuller seemed to have rusted. Fire in Ping’an Palace turned the western sky red.

She suppressed the vying warlords with force and eradicated dissent. The situation stabilized somewhat. Then, there was no stopping her once she got started—one after another, she added new upgraded immortal tools to her body. Each time Xi Ping saw her, she was more ferocious than the last time. Among the swords of Northern Li, none was more richly endowed with talent than her, none more willing to sacrifice than her. They had to bow their heads and give her their allegiance.

Though there had been countless cruel and ruthless people in Northern Li’s history, Wu Lingxiao still stood out among them.

After seizing sole power, she overturned the policies of shutting the nation to the outside world and forbidding Moon Plated Gold that had held for nearly two hundred years and began to commandeer domestic land almost radically, urging people to construct factories. At first glance, this seemed like a good thing, but ruling a great nation was like boiling a small fish—the reasons that made chronic diseases chronic had complicated history behind them; interests, culture, structure, and even the system of government couldn’t keep up with her “instant success” strategy.

And Wu Lingxiao’s method of “cutting the knot” was always the same—killing.

She abandoned the Night Revenants, chose the obedient and useful among them, reorganized them into the “Night Criers,” went to great expense to purchase equipment from Wan, then, copying the set-up of the Luwu, spread her “informers” out across whole length and breadth of Northern Li. It was said that Wu Lingxiao had special upgraded immortal tools in her ears, so when the Night Criers thought it necessary, she could directly “see” the scene long-distance.

Like Western Chu, now that Northern Li had become “enlightened,” on the surface it no longer prohibited the publications of toilet bulletins or the movement of people in and out. But before a renowned scholar’s article wantonly decrying the new policies could be published, his whole family died in flames. The Yanning nobles who had received word in advance and were preparing to escape encountered shipwrecks or assassins; no one managed to leave the northern continent of incessant wind and snow alive.

What brought this bloody page to its climax was “Ping’an Palace’s Night of Blood”—in Yanning’s Ping’an Palace, a favored concubine of the puppet emperor, confident of enjoying favor, got drunk and spoke without discretion, saying a few words mocking Wu Lingxiao. The next morning, she was found dead in bed by palace maids, her mouth wide open, her tongue and teeth gone, the bed dyed rust-colored with her blood.

Under the enormous shadow of the Wanshuang Sword, the Cloud Soaring Flood Dragon went through the northern continent, factories grew up dense as trees in a forest, and the former Disciple Hall for sword cultivators became a place specially devoted to training new Night Criers. Wu Lingxiao appointed herself Kunlun’s orthodoxy and publicly challenged her former fellow sect members. She killed a dozen master sword cultivators who had studied under the Sect Leader and the Third Elder. Three ascended spirit masters passed away, including Kunlun’s Cheng Yu, the only one Xi Ping knew.

From then on, never mind the full name “Wu Lingxiao,” even “Duchess Changji,” “Duchess,” “Wanshuang,” and the term “sword-bearing” became taboo words on the northern continent.

The people of the northern continent had the valor and tenacity of those who braved the winds and defied the snow, and they were also the world’s most obedient citizens, most capable of enduring humiliation for a higher cause. “There are ears stuck to the threshold, and a knife to cut your throat in the frosty wind”—from the officials, nobles, and cultivators of the immortal mountain above to the common peddlers, herdsmen, and serfs below, everyone was on edge, not daring to say a single word out of line.

Zhi Xiu with his bone-deep breeding would enumerate a person’s good points even when badmouthing them behind their back. After this, when Wu Lingxiao was mentioned, he simply didn’t discuss her. His attitude was clear.

But the master of Wanshuang still came to the Xuanyin Mountains every few years. It was lonely to stand too high above the rest; apart from Zhi Xiu, there was no one else left on earth who could understand her way of the sword. She couldn’t even find an opponent for a debate.

“I get stuck with all the difficult ones,” Xi Ping muttered. He whistled to the karma beast and bestirred himself to greet her. “Senior, I hope you have been well…”

Before he could finish, a beam of sword light came right toward him. Xi Ping wouldn’t respond to this attack. He turned and sauntered out of a nearly reincarnation wood tree and finished his sentence: “…since we last met.”

Wu Lingxiao was even taller than the last time he had seen her. She had countless things attached to her, like a warship on legs. On entering another nation’s borders, all her offensive weaponry had to be disabled; otherwise, there would also have been a bloody light on her.

At present, the fourth generation of spirit-conducting gold had been developed, and the technique had been disseminated among all the nations. In fact, it had long ago been possible to make a half-puppet seem hardly any different from a human. But she hadn’t repaired her countenance. As before, there was a thin layer of human skin over her face, and large expanses of metal were exposed. Her manmade eyeballs glowed red, scanning back and forth. Meeting her gaze could give you half a night’s worth of nightmares.

Wu Lingxiao looked askance at him. “What, you don’t dare to respond to a single attack?”

Xi Ping, grinning, tucked his hands into his sleeves. “Let’s say I respond to one of your attacks, and you give us a ten percent discount on iron ore and furs next year. How about that?”

Wu Lingxiao suddenly worked herself into a fury, feeling that he was insulting her sword, but before she could scold him, Xi Ping offered a perfunctory salute. “I have already notified my shizun. He is practicing swordsmanship at the rear of the mountain, and it will take him some time to arrive. Won’t you come in and have a seat, senior?”

Having said this, without waiting for the guest to answer, he disappeared where he stood, transporting himself right to the potted reincarnation wood tree inside the cottage.

Wu Lingxiao paused, slowly put Wanshuang away, and swallowed her chiding—Xi Ping refused to walk two steps without using reincarnation wood to transport himself; this was a veiled warning.

The Law Breaker enveloped the northern and southern continents. The spiritual mountains were dead. The position of the master of the Tai Sui Qin and the Eternal Flame was transcendent; he was the only person she needed to have scruples about.

When she went into the little cottage and took a look, had she had eyebrows, perhaps they would have flown to the top of her head. Wu Lingxiao had lived for centuries, and she had never heard of a shifu going out into the cold and snow to practice swordsmanship while his disciple dozed, hugging the heater.

“I’m not normally so idle. I was specifically waiting to welcome our important guest.” Xi Ping removed the wine that couldn’t be used for receiving guests and put an earthenware jar on the stove to boil water for tea instead. He put a civil and insincere smile on his face. “Please have a seat, senior. I was just speaking of this year’s price of iron…”

Wu Lingxiao stiffly interrupted him: “I came to discuss the sword, not to discuss business.”

“Well.” Xi Ping nodded obligingly. When it came to “discussing” the sword, he had nothing to say; he simply didn’t say a word and started a staring contest with their guest; they would see who felt awkward first.

Perhaps Zhi Xiu was crawling back. The water boiled, and he was still nowhere to be seen. Wu Lingxiao really couldn’t take it. She said to Xi Ping, “Whatever else Flying Jade Peak may be, it still has the reputation of the Sword of the South. With an unfilial disciple like you, how has your shifu not broken your legs yet?”

Xi Ping rinsed the bowls and moistened the pot, putting on a great show with the tea set. Hearing these words, he raised his eyebrows and gave an indirect answer to the question: “My shizun likes to eat glutinous rice dumplings, because when he was little, back home in Jinping, every day when he finished his martial training, they would make him a bowl to eat at home.”

Wu Lingxiao sneered and muttered “southerners” under her breath.

Xi Ping continued to speak unhurriedly: “No matter how old a person gets, he still likes to eat what he was used to eating as a child. If you like it, too, he’ll tell you that it’s best to dip them in osmanthus sugar. If you want to learn, he’ll enthusiastically teach you the best way to blend the ingredients for the sugar. If you’re afraid of getting your false teeth stuck in it and won’t touch the stuff, at most he’ll mock you for missing out on good food. He won’t force you to eat it, and he certainly won’t break your legs if you don’t eat it. Senior, for my shizun, the way of the sword is a bowl of osmanthus sugar dumplings.”

When Wu Lingxiao had heard out this fallacy, she said, “Bullshit.”

Xi Ping, without urgency, asked in turn, “Then, senior, would you instruct me, if the way of the sword isn’t osmanthus sugar dumplings, then what is it?”

Wu Lingxiao said, “My sword is…”

“I know that the sword you wield is Wanshuang, but what is Wanshuang to you?”

Wu Lingxiao froze. When it came to discussing the sword, talking about sword aura, she could go on at great length, talk in a steady stream. She was the true root of Kunlun’s ninefold sword.  Kunlun’s ninefold sword was wide-ranging and profound, its sword aura inherited in a direct line from Wanshuang’s Sword Ancestor. It was a sword unwilling to snap amid ice and frost, a sword that roared as it cut through the northern wind.

It shook heaven and earth; it was irresistible.

But a sword like this, what was it to her?

Wu Lingxiao coldly said, “What kind of insulting question is that? Wanshuang is me, and I am Wanshuang.”

“As far as I know, Wanshuang acknowledged you as its master less than three hundred years ago. Was it really because you looked at this sword and felt kinship with it that you transformed yourself into a sword-bearing half-puppet?”

Wu Lingxiao furiously said, “You…”

The reincarnation wood branches in the room swiftly elongated, firmly holding down the table Wu Lingxiao had almost knocked over. The karma beast had returned at some point. Its bright gaze shot out from the clock and fell on Wu Lingxiao.

But she seemed not to feel it. Xi Ping’s gaze came through the dense steam. There was a sly smile in it. Wu Lingxiao almost had an illusion of being sucked in by that gaze, irresistibly recalling the past in response to his words.

Her close kin and her elders had all left her then. She had suddenly lost everything. Under the Kunlun Mountains were hundreds of thousands of hands that wanted to pull her to the bottom of the valley. All she had was one desperate gamble—

Xi Ping’s voice became even softer. “Even if that was the case, before you encountered Wanshuang, what was the way of the sword to you then, senior?”

In Kunlun’s Disciple Hall, newer disciples weren’t separated from older disciples. There was a trial by fire every month, where anything might happen. At each trial by fire, the new disciples who had just joined would be bullied until they were half dead. If you wanted to endure less hardship, you had to strive desperately to become stronger. The old disciples didn’t want to suffer retaliation from wave after wave of shidis who had become stronger, so they didn’t dare to slack off for a single breath, either. Each one of them grit their teeth, held blood in their mouth, raised their sword again and again. It was especially hard for a girl, particularly after her brother had been eliminated.

Xi Ping’s voice, which had become slightly distant, floated into her ears. “…I heard that it was blood and tears.”

Wu Lingxiao’s heart and mind shook. “A pack of drivel…”

“Only hatred and fear will give rise to anger. But I’m someone else’s disciple. How is it any of your business whether I’m good at the sword? Why do you get angry as soon as you see me? Since you don’t hate me or fear me, then what is it that you hate? What is it that you dread?” Xi Ping said softly. “Kunlun? Wanshuang? Or yourself without Wanshuang in your hand—”

After about two incense sticks of time, Zhi Xiu at last trailed in.

He smelled of medicine and was walking very slowly, as if his legs were acting up again. When he walked in, he didn’t see Wu Lingxiao, only saw that Xi Ping had put out the fire he had used to boil water and poured the water right out. The smell of wine still lingering in the room covered up a trace of another aroma. Only someone accustomed to smelling the wine would be able to distinguish it.

“Where is Fellow Cultivator Wu?”

Xi Ping, “Got rid of her. You can stop pretending to be lame, shifu.”

“Is that any way to talk?” General Zhi’s feeble legs did indeed become nimble at once. He took two herbal plasters from his sleeves and set them aside. “And what’s that smell you have here?”

“I got it from Stut…Stupendous Scholar Wen-shishu.” Under his shifu’s gaze, Xi Ping changed his wording midway and took a medicine bag out from under the earthenware jar. “I know when to stop. This thing only refreshes the mind and improves the memory. It’s undetectable. Don’t worry, she won’t come again… Listen, where did you find such stinking herbal plasters? Are you sure these things are for treating rheumatism? What a shoddy act…”

As expected, Wanshuang did not come south again. Only much later, when there was an occasional mention of the “Sword of the South,” she would say, “Our ways differ.”

She had grown up amid dread and become the dread of countless people. The northern wind couldn’t blow away the enormous shadow she cast.

Thirty-five years later, Wu Lingxiao was betrayed by her subordinates and attacked by assassins willing to die at a critical moment in replacing her puppet parts. The upgraded immortal tools attached to her blew her and a dozen assassins to dust together. The northern continent’s darkest epoch ushered in a sliver of dawn.

In the morning light, the Cloud Soaring Flood Dragon railways were laid down, the system of industry was fixed; under a myriad of souls of the dead, it was the northern continent that broke free of the shackles of the old spiritual mountains fastest of all.

The rights and wrongs of Wu Lingxiao’s life were hard to judge.

She had been born amid wind and snow, and she was scattered amid wind and snow, quietly and without a trace, like a late frost¹ dissipating in the rays of the morning sun.