Ever since the Green-Robed Wanderer had declared at the gathering in the Golden Wave Pavilion that he would freely hand over Chen Shigu's coveted legendary relic to whoever found the Donkey-Riding Lady, Luoyang's major sects had been secretly vying with one another. Reports arrived one after another at the little courtyard beside the Luo River.
Yet plentiful reports did not necessarily mean truthful ones. Even those that were true might have nothing to do with the Donkey-Riding Lady's disappearance; someone still had to investigate and verify them. The members of the Setting Sun Courtyard worked day and night, checking them one by one. Along the way, they solved who knew how many baffling cases, but never found the lead they wanted.
As the saying went, "One monk carried water to drink, two monks carried it between them, and three monks had no water to drink." In the Rivers and Lakes, bands of three were exceedingly rare.
Zhou Zian, head of the Mount Song Academy, enjoyed wielding his brush and often recorded curious tales from the Rivers and Lakes. In notes he had made over a decade earlier, he found a lead: there had once been two outlaws from the same school, known as the Wind and Thunder Heroes. The elder martial brother, a man surnamed Zhang called Wind-Chasing Cloud, possessed exceptional qinggong; the younger, a man surnamed Xu called Thunderbolt Hand, wielded formidable fists and palms. The two had stirred up wind and waves throughout the Central Plains, committing every imaginable evil. Their martial arts bore some resemblance to the evidence Wei Xun had provided, except that one person was missing.
The Setting Sun Courtyard investigated this lead and learned from the Beggar Gang that the authorities had long ago captured the pair in an ambush with crossbowmen, then beheaded