Brilliant lights shone along both banks, and a full moon hung on the horizon.
The two raised sails billowed into semicircles in the river wind, driving the merchant ship downstream.
The merchant ship was sixty feet long. Its forward cargo deck was empty except for three fine horses.
At the stern stood a small cabin house, with dim yellow lamplight inside and the silhouettes of two women visible on the paper windows.
Dressed in a black robe, Ye Jingtang sat cross-legged at the bow, a long saber in a black sheath laid across his knees as he watched the surging river.
The large, fluffy Niao Niao squatted beside him, white down fluttering in the river wind, cooing and chirping as though muttering:
The world's storms rose from birds of our generation; once in the martial world, the years hurried us on...
A few months earlier, when Ye Jingtang had first arrived in Capital City, the old escort Yang Chao had asked where he and his bird would go next.
His answer then, that they would go into the martial world, had only been an offhand joke. Only after making his way through it did he understand what the martial world was.
At its core, the martial world was all sorts of people, linked together by countless loves, hatreds, kindnesses, and grudges.
Kindness had to be repaid, vengeance had to be taken. Once encountered, these things could never be set aside. Hence the saying, "In the martial world, your life is not your own."
The martial world was no fine place, but fortunately, his adoptive father had been thoroughly unsparing with him as a child, beating him three times a day and leaving no room in his heart for wishful thinking or slackness.
The escort agency had earned little, yet his