Clop, clop...
Autumn painted the mountains green and yellow as three swift horses followed the banks of the Yan River, drawing closer to the capital of the Northern Liang Dynasty.
Wearing a bamboo hat, his sabre resting horizontally behind his waist, Ye Jingtang galloped onward and surveyed the landscape he had traveled through once before. Suddenly, he felt how swiftly the years flew by, like a shuttle through a loom.
Looking back, not much time had passed since he left Liangzhou last spring, but he had spent almost all of that year and more traveling the martial world-he had experienced the splendor of both dynasties' capitals, climbed the towering ranges of Hong Mountain and the Wu Mountains, swung his sabre like falling rain over Dreamcloud Marsh and Tianlang Lake, and ridden the wind and broken the waves across the Sand Sea and the Eastern Sea...
He had met many people and experienced many things along the way. Some of those people had died, some had left, and many beauties had stayed by his side.
While traveling, he had no time to carefully revisit the days gone by. Only now, back on the banks of the Yan River, did he suddenly realize that he seemed to have lived half a lifetime, or already traveled roads that ordinary people could scarcely finish walking in their entire lives.
After wandering long enough, people of the martial world all wanted to return home. But by the time most realized it, they were already at the end of their lives. Their hometowns remained, but the people had changed, and even if they wanted to return, they no longer knew where home was.
Ye Jingtang was clearly fortunate. He had yet to come of age; for others his age, life had not truly begun. If he