A silver moon hung overhead.
A mounted party of a dozen or so travelers from afar stopped outside a residence in Heicu City. Their leader wore a gauze scarf to shield his head from the sun. He had no hair, and there were even nine ordination scars on his scalp. His name was Jingkong.
Though he looked like a monk, he was no proper Buddhist disciple. At seventeen or eighteen, poverty had driven him to steal donation money from the Thousand Buddha Temple. The warrior monks had caught him and confined him to the Thousand Buddha Grotto to do odd jobs, forcing him into the monastic life.
Gifted with keen understanding, Jingkong had secretly picked up martial arts through everything he saw and heard. In his thirties, he had escaped the Thousand Buddha Temple and become the right-hand man of Huang Liansheng, leader of the Shatuo Tribe.
Huang Liansheng's ancestor had been Great Yan's governor of Shazhou. When the realm fell into chaos sixty years ago, he had declared himself king and become a warlord, only to suffer a swift downfall. He had fled into the sea of sand with his remaining followers, forming the Shatuo Tribe beyond the bounds of civilization. It lay over a thousand li from Shazhou, with territory comparable to a commandery of the Southern and Northern Dynasties and a population of only around eighty thousand.
The Shatuo Tribe was merely a tiny state tucked away in a corner. Even its basic supplies depended on escort agencies and traveling merchants from within the pass. It also paid annual tribute and acknowledged Great Wei as its suzerain, so Great Wei had paid the little place no mind. Huang Liansheng's ambitions, however, were far from small.
Huang Liansheng had previously traveled to Yun'an to study while delivering tribute,