"The more you say, the more interested I get!" Antonidas said.
"If you won't listen, suit yourself. Find your own jianghu. No one can help you with that," Yu Lin Bloodhawk said.
But inwardly, he thought, Hell, I'm still confused myself. How would I know where the jianghu is? The Red Flower Society and the Heaven and Earth Society aimed to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty or a Han Dynasty. Their members were Jianghu Wanderers. Then did the Tongmenghui, the predecessor of the Kuomintang, and the predecessors of the Chinese Communist Party count too?
Street performers were Jianghu Wanderers, and so were bandits. The Four Great Constables were Jianghu Wanderers, and sometimes even imperial palace guards were. Their modern equivalents would be traveling merchants, thieves, robbers, police officers, and Zhongnanhai bodyguards. Did all those people count as Jianghu Wanderers too?
Come to think of it, I'd never heard of an emperor being a Jianghu Wanderer, but every other group seemed to have people who were. Did jianghu refer to a way of doing things, or a social group whose values differed from those of mainstream society? Or was there some other explanation?
Gu Long once said, "Where is the jianghu? Wherever there are people, there is jianghu." He'd used that line to gloss over the question too. So did I count as a Jianghu Wanderer now?
*Being exiled made me a convict, and convicts always seemed to have some tangled, inexplicable connection with Jianghu Wanderers. Establishing an armed organization in the Hinterlands made it an illegal organization. But if I really thought about it, I hadn't broken any country's laws, had I? At most, I'd broken the Vilebranch Trolls' laws. Did that make us a gang? Hmph, could breaking Troll laws even count as breaking the