The Gu Family's Destruction

Gu Shenwei dug his fingers into his thigh, trying to drive away the sleepiness that clung stubbornly to him. He had been riding hard for almost the entire night. Exhausted and drowsy, with his head spinning, he now understood just how grueling horseback riding could be. Back when his family had journeyed thousands of miles from the Central Plains to the Western Regions, he had spent the whole way curled up in his family's arms, barely feeling the harshness of the Gobi Desert.

He reined in his horse. Two roads stretched before him, one veering north and the other south. Master Yang had only told him to keep heading west, never saying which way to choose at a fork.

Fortunately, there were finally people on the road. Unfortunately, the first few groups he encountered couldn't speak Central Plains dialect.

Gu Shenwei took the task Master Yang Zheng had given him very seriously and couldn't bear to wait around on the road. He simply chose the northern route at random. After riding for a while, he finally came across a group of herders. One of them spoke fluent Central Plains dialect. He told Gu Shenwei he had taken the wrong road, then burst out laughing when he heard the boy was looking for "Marshal Yang."

"There's no Marshal Yang in the capital, and there's no Marshal Yang anywhere in the whole Shule Kingdom."

"If Master Yang said there is one, then there is," Gu Shenwei replied with certainty. The herder had probably never met any high-ranking officials or nobles.

"Haha, your master sure knows how to tell a joke. We don't have any marshals in Shule Kingdom, only generals and captains. And even if we did have a marshal, why would he be a Central Plains man named Yang?"

The herders laughed as they rode away, leaving Gu Shenwei standing alone where he was.

Gu Shenwei wasn't a fool; he was simply naive. He had never been deceived before. The worst setbacks in his life had been his two older brothers picking on him, so he had always readily believed and accepted everything his father and master told him. But as soon as he began to think it through carefully, he realized that the whole affair had been strange from beginning to end.

An ominous premonition rose in the boy's heart.

Gu Shenwei turned his horse around and galloped back the way he had come, his face set in a grim line. Being left out of the family's affairs felt awful. He wanted to know how his father and Yang Zheng would explain all this when he saw them again.

By noon, Gu Shenwei still hadn't met up with his sister and the other three. A caravan was coming from the east, everyone looking flustered, as if they'd just been robbed. Perhaps out of kindness, one of them shouted to the boy racing along alone on horseback:

"Turn back! Turn back!"

Gu Shenwei ignored the well-meaning warning, his heart tightening even more. His horse was foaming at the mouth, but he still lashed it with the Horse Whip, urging it to go faster.

Half an hour later, he saw a long spear standing upright beside the road in the distance, swaying gently like a flagpole stripped of its banner.

A human head was impaled on its tip, white hair drifting in disarray.

When he drew closer, Gu Shenwei recognized his master: Yang Zheng, the old servant of the Gu Family. His eyes were wide open, as if he couldn't accept his own death.

He had once used a long spear to skewer three men in succession. Yet, after just one night, he had ended up with his head severed from his body. Whoever had killed him must have wanted to make an example of him, impaling his head on the spear to display it to passersby.

Then Gu Shenwei saw the bodies lying across the ground. There was more than one.

Yang Zheng's body lay near the spear. It bore no wounds. His killer had been swift and decisive, taking his head with a single move. Gu Shenwei couldn't imagine how formidable that person's martial arts must have been.

There were three more bodies nearby. One belonged to the maid Juxiang. Her chest and face were crisscrossed with knife wounds, and blood had soaked her clothes. She couldn't fight at all, yet the killer had struck her several extra times, apparently just to torment her.

Another was the young page Mingxiang. He was still wearing the young master's clothes, and Gu Shenwei could identify him only by his attire. Mingxiang's head was missing. It hadn't been impaled on the spear, nor had it been tossed nearby.

Gu Shenwei fell off his horse and dropped to his knees, unable to stop himself from retching. Only when there was nothing left in his stomach did he force himself to look at the last body, because something about it was strange.

To Gu Shenwei's slight relief, the last body wasn't his sister's. It belonged to a boy about his age. Like Juxiang, he was covered in wounds, but his face was unfamiliar. Gu Shenwei had never seen him before.

Gu Shenwei leaped onto his horse and continued galloping east. He had to find out what had happened to his sister. He had to go home and understand what it all meant.

As far as he knew, the Gu Family had no enemies—not in the Central Plains, and even less so in the Western Regions.

By dusk, Gu Shenwei had reached the village at the foot of the manor hill. The village's dozen or so households were all tenant farmers of the Gu Family. At this hour, the usual sight should have been cooking smoke curling up from every roof. Today, every door was shut tight, and not a wisp of smoke rose.

He looked up the hill. The Gu Family Manor had been reduced to ashes.

Gu Shenwei reached his own front gate, dismounted, and stood there in a daze, his mind blank. He stared at the blackened ruins as if trapped inside some strange dream, unable to wake no matter how hard he tried.

Was his home really gone just like that? Were all its people really dead?

Stepping over roof tiles and broken timber that still held a trace of warmth, Gu Shenwei searched the rooms one by one, as if the roofs and walls were still standing.

It had been a slaughter without a trace of resistance. Every body lay where it had fallen, burned beyond recognition, but by their locations, Gu Shenwei could still roughly tell who the dead were.

His father, Gu Lun, and his mother, Madam Xu, lay side by side, both decapitated. Gu Shenwei had to push aside the bricks and timbers covering them before he could see their two small skeletons. Gu Lun had been a martial arts master, a great hero in his son's eyes, yet he hadn't even sensed the enemy's approach.

His two older brothers lay where they had fallen too, likewise decapitated, likewise dead in silence. Their martial skills, honed through more than a decade of hard practice, had never had the chance to come into play.

The servants and retainers had all been left whole. It seemed the killers were interested only in the masters' heads.

But his sister was still nowhere to be found. In her room, there were only the bodies of three maids. Though they were burned beyond recognition, Gu Shenwei could still tell that none of them was his sister.

The boy, who had lived without a care and been doted on since childhood, had suddenly fallen into a life of utter ruin. At first, all he felt was fear. His home was gone. Who would protect him now? Who would guide him?

He had planned to step into adulthood only after his sister's wedding. In the blink of an eye, he found himself stranded alone in a strange world, with an uncertain future and fog all around him.

Slowly, anger took hold of the boy's heart. He would find his sister. He would take revenge. He would kill every last one of his enemies, no matter how many there were or where they came from.

Once he had set his mind on revenge, Gu Shenwei regained his composure. He couldn't go after the enemy empty-handed. He needed some resources.

The assassins had plundered the manor, sweeping away most of its valuables, but there were bound to be a few things they'd missed.

Gu Shenwei had never cared about the household finances. But at that moment, countless little details of daily life flickered through his mind, and from them he pieced together a few small secrets.

Beneath his second brother's bed, he dug up a small bundle of silver. As he pushed aside the body above it, he nearly burst into tears, but forced himself to hold back. What use were tears? When he was a little boy, they might have won him comfort and help. Now they meant only weakness and shame.

The road to revenge would be long, and he didn't even know who his enemies were yet. The most important thing now was to decide what to do with his family's remains.

The masters of the Gu Family hadn't even been left whole. The fire had burned them down to charred skeletons that would break at the slightest touch. Carefully, Gu Shenwei carried the remains of his two brothers into his parents' room and laid them beside the other two skeletons.

"Room" was only a manner of speaking. There was no room left. The roof had collapsed, the walls had fallen, and the ground was covered with ashes, bricks, burned wood, and copper and iron objects. Before long, this place would become a barren grave, with grass growing over the broken walls and scattered ruins.

Gu Shenwei had seen villages like that before, where bones gleamed white among the weeds, crawling things made their nests, and passing birds and beasts trampled them underfoot.

He couldn't let his family endure that torment after dying with their bodies already incomplete.

Gu Shenwei suddenly hardened his heart. He found a brick from the wall, knelt down, and smashed the four skeletons to pieces. He struck each blow with all his strength, as if he were attacking an enemy. At some point, he realized tears were streaming down his face.

"Heaven is unjust!"

Gu Shenwei said bitterly, scooping up the bone ash and scattering it into the air. The Gu Family shouldn't have met such a fate. Though his father, Gu Lun, had practiced martial arts, he had never involved himself in the grudges of the martial world. He had been exceedingly cautious at the Imperial Court and had always avoided offending anyone, steadfastly choosing the path of forbearance, sometimes to the point of seeming weak.

Perhaps his father had enemies in secret. But the Gu Family had already moved thousands of miles away to the Western Regions. What knot could be so impossible to untie that they had to pursue them all the way here?

Gu Shenwei couldn't understand it. He blamed it all on Heaven, grabbed the brick, and flung it high into the air.

After cruelly tormenting the Gu Family, Heaven seemed to want to mock the young master once more. The brick rose only a few feet, traced an almost sneering arc through the air, and fell outside the "door." With a clank, it struck a flowerpot by the entrance.

The pomegranate tree in the pot had become a charred stump, and the pot had been burned brittle. At the sound of the impact, it split into several pieces and crumbled to the ground.

Gu Shenwei had already used up all his strength. After throwing the brick, he sank to his knees, braced himself with both hands, and gasped for breath. He didn't even have the strength to curse.

Just a moment later, Heaven's mockery turned into a miraculous revelation. Gu Shenwei lifted his head and saw the clump of soil still holding the shape of the flowerpot. Suddenly, he remembered something.

Then he rushed outside like a madman. He dug frantically through the scorched earth with both hands and tossed the flower roots aside. From the bottom of the pot, he dug up a tiny oilcloth bundle. He gave it a gentle squeeze and felt a book inside. At last, he breathed a sigh of relief, carefully slipped it inside his robe, behind the small bundle of silver, and hid it close to his body.

He remembered something he had seen one night, not long after they had moved to the Western Regions: his father had slipped an object into a flowerpot. He had been half asleep at the time and had only wondered at his father's actions, never giving them any serious thought. Now, with his family destroyed, a flash of insight struck him, and he guessed what his father had hidden.

The tiny oilcloth bundle contained a shortcut method for mastering Hehe Jin.

Hehe Jin was divided into nine levels of Yang Jin and nine levels of Yin Jin. Even Gu Lun, who had practiced it longer than anyone else, had reached only the fifth level in both. But there was a shortcut method that could greatly increase one's strength in a short time, though it carried enormous risks. Few of the Gu Family's inheritors had ever practiced it.

The highest level of Hehe Jin would make its practitioner invincible beneath Heaven. Gu Shenwei believed this without a doubt. All at once, Heaven was no longer the culprit behind the Gu Family's disaster. On the contrary, it had pointed Gu Shenwei toward a path of revenge.

Gu Shenwei had just cursed Heaven, so he preferred to call this miracle the "Divine Will." He was only fourteen and had always lived beneath the shelter of his father and brothers. He had never imagined that one day he would have to bear the burden of revenge. In truth, he vaguely wished that he had been the one to die. Either of his older brothers would have been far more suited to avenging their family.

He needed the "Divine Will" to sustain his faith in revenge.

But the most important thing now was to find his last remaining family member, the sister who had doted on him most, Cuilan. She might still be alive, suffering somewhere.

The "Divine Will" played another joke on him just then: a shrill whistle suddenly rang out beyond the manor, especially hair-raising in the stillness of the dark night.