The cold wind sighed, and frost bit to the bone. A layer of dead branches and withered leaves had gathered in the courtyard, but no one cleared them away.
Dressed in a patched gray robe, Chen Shigu stood beside the brazier, reading.
He leafed through the pages idly. This was a collection of poems, rhapsodies, and policy essays by this year's newly ranked jinshi. The list of outstanding candidates had barely been posted before busybodies in Chang'an City compiled a volume and began copying and circulating it. These twenty-odd men were the finest talents in the entire empire. From now on, they would bend their backs to the utmost in service to this nation, which was slipping from prosperity into decline, and rest only in death.
The Qujiang banquet, the most splendid and glorious celebration in the Great Tang, would soon be held for these newly ranked jinshi. Surely they were so delighted at having burned away their tails to become dragons, becoming disciples of the Son of Heaven, that they lay awake all night. Even their poetry brimmed with vigor and hope.
Chen Shigu sneered with malicious delight, then suddenly clutched his chest and coughed and wheezed for a while before tossing the booklet into the brazier to burn.
Beneath the chill moonlight, a thin, spindly figure slowly came into view.
There were no footsteps.
Even with hearing keen enough to discern the finest detail, he could no longer detect the slightest sound.
The youth in blue stood quietly beneath the covered walkway, refusing to enter.
"I'm leaving," he said.
He rarely called him Master, and Chen Shigu rarely called him by name. The old man and the boy addressed each other as "hey," until Chen Shigu, in a mocking mood, simply gave him the prestigious surname Wei. When he bought the little brat from starving refugees for ten copper coins, he had never asked his parents' surname.
As for reverence for heaven, earth, sovereign, parents, and teachers, or gentleness, kindness, respect, frugality, and humility, Chen Shigu had always cast them aside like worn-out shoes.
Chen Shigu sneered. "Don't want to learn anymore?"
The youth said, "I've already learned everything I can. What I want to learn, you refuse to teach."
"It's not that I refuse to teach you," Chen Shigu said flatly. "The things in books are poison. Learning them brings nothing but endless pain and vexation, and does you not the slightest good."
That reasoning could not persuade the youth. He said stubbornly, "But you take poison every day."
Chen Shigu pointed at his bed-a battered old coffin-and said, "That's why I've ended up like this."
He taught him martial arts and how to locate burial sites and rob tombs, but forbade him to learn to read and write. Yet the little brat was wild and untamable, refusing to obey and sneaking off to eavesdrop at the schoolroom.
When Chen Shigu punished him, he even argued with perfect conviction, "I didn't pay the teacher any tuition. I listened secretly from the roof. Since I stole the lessons, it doesn't count as disobeying your orders."
That had been five years ago. Back then, he could still give the brat a sound thrashing. Three years later, he could land only two or three blows before the boy escaped.
"You can only steal."
After taking him as his disciple, Chen Shigu gave him neither enough food to fill his belly nor padded clothes to wear, telling him to steal for himself. If he managed to steal something, he ate; if he failed, he went cold and hungry. As for being caught, beaten, and cursed by the rightful owner, that merely meant his skills were lacking.
He truly treated his disciple badly, so it was only right that the youth should leave.
Without the slightest warning, Chen Shigu sprang into motion, drawing his sword and thrusting as he lunged toward the doorway like a gray dragon. Driven by his powerful internal energy, the blade hummed.
The youth in blue bent backward and, with a light spring, drifted back into the courtyard. Chen Shigu pursued him with thrust after thrust. Without even turning around, the youth continued retreating and dodging, his Mirage Step mysterious and unpredictable, his figure ghostlike. Chen Shigu's sword moves changed in a heartbeat, unfolding into more than a thousand variations in an instant. The sword tip remained poised an inch from the youth's chest, yet could never pierce it.
A gray shadow and a blue shadow intertwined and wheeled, now close, now apart, moving too quickly for their techniques to be discerned. Sword energy spilled in every direction, sending all the fallen leaves in the courtyard dancing into the air. They formed a vast net around the two swiftly moving figures.
They fought for a long while. Though neither could claim victory for the moment, one advanced while the other retreated, and the difference in their abilities was plain.
Suddenly, the youth leaped into the air, floating up to the treetop like a wisp of blue smoke, and stood still.
Chen Shigu stood in the courtyard with his sword in hand. That thrust had never pierced the youth's chest-not because he would not, but because he could not. He was old now, weakened to the utmost. Even with all his strength, he could no longer kill this little brat.
The fallen leaves whirled aloft by the sword energy settled one by one. An autumn breeze swept past, and the youth in blue swayed with it atop the tree as though he weighed nothing. Beneath the moonlight, his thin, pale, narrow face lay hidden in shadow, indistinct. Only his eyes, black as dabs of lacquer, gleamed.
Was the brat fourteen now, or fifteen? Chen Shigu had not asked back then, so he did not know either. He remembered that the boy had been no bigger than a kitten, yet scratched and bit, utterly feral. His parents, whose clothes barely covered them, could spare only one copper coin to buy a stick of malt candy, and even then they barely coaxed him into leaving with his buyer.
He was exceedingly stubborn and intensely proud, just as Chen Shigu had been in his youth. Only that once-unstoppable young man now had a head full of gray hair.
How long could that pride endure in this dark and vicious age of turmoil? Without attachments, there was no fear. He was so fast now because nothing fettered his free heart and mind. That might not hold true in the future.
The brat would batter himself bloody against the world and return in despair, his exceptional gifts steeped in resentment. Only then would his martial arts truly reach perfect mastery and the pinnacle of attainment.
Chen Shigu could not help looking toward the empty coffin inside.
You lie buried beneath the earth, where mud wears away your bones; I linger in the mortal world, my head blanketed in snow.
Time slipped by. That person had already been dead for nearly forty years. Chen Shigu realized that he truly was old. When a man often recalled the past, it meant he no longer had a future to look forward to. The hatred he had been unable to vent throughout his life, the despair that bordered on madness-in the end, it amounted to no more than a handful of yellow earth and ruined burial pits scattered across the ground.
"Brilliance that dazzles the world, vast learning and profound knowledge, mastery of civil and martial arts, unmatched in his age; yet all he seeks and wishes for shall ultimately come to naught." That was the prophecy his own master, the Barefoot Daoist, had left him. He had come from darkness and glimpsed, for an instant, the light of nothingness, yet he was destined to return to darkness once more.
With a clang, Chen Shigu threw his longsword to the ground and swept away, leaving one sentence behind:
"Your apprenticeship is over."