Before darkness fell, Yang Ge used his saber as a crutch and felt his way out of the mountain forest. He had walked barely a mile when he spotted a group of farmers returning home with hoes on their shoulders...
He looked down at his tattered clothes, then simply tore them off, wrapped his saber and sword in them, and slung the bundle onto his back. He rubbed some dirt from the ground carefully over his face and body, trying his best to look like a refugee fleeing famine rather than a troublemaking martial wanderer, so he would not frighten anyone.
"Heading home, gentlemen?"
With a smile plastered across his face, he hurried over and saluted an elderly man at the rear of the group from a distance. "I'm a traveling merchant from Henan. I wandered into the forest and lost my way. Could I trouble you for directions?"
The old man lowered his hoe and leaned on it, looking Yang Ge's bedraggled figure up and down. With a kindly smile that exposed his yellow teeth, he asked, "Where are you headed, lad?"
Yang Ge feigned helplessness. "I was trying to get to Hangzhou... Sir, where are we?"
"Hangzhou?"
As though he had heard a joke, the old man burst out laughing. "You've strayed a fair way off course! This is Dragon-Tiger Mountain."
"Dragon-Tiger Mountain?"
Yang Ge froze for two seconds before suddenly realizing what that meant. He blurted out in disbelief, "This is Dragon-Tiger Mountain? The ancestral seat of the Orthodox Unity lineage?"
"That's right!"
The old man nodded cheerfully and pointed northeast, patiently explaining, "If you're going to Hangzhou, head that way. Walk thirty or forty li and you'll reach the main road. Follow it for another two days and you'll get to Raozhou..."
But Yang Ge could